Jake Martinez stares at his lunch tray. He isn’t looking at his food. He’s listening.
Giggling. Whispers. Somebody saying his name.
Half the cafeteria has phones out. They look at their screens, then at him, then back at their screens, and then they start giggling.
Something on those phones is about him. He knows it.
That scene is the one I care about most in the whole book, because a lot of kids live through that moment with nobody noticing. Few subjects are as ugly as cyberbullying. The cruelty arrives through a device the child carries everywhere, the crowd is invisible, and the adults in the building can walk right past it.
Why write a young adult book at all?
I wanted to write one, and I went about it the way I go about most unfamiliar forms, by studying somebody who already does it well.
In this case R.L. Stine, who has written for readers aged roughly seven to fifteen for decades and has thought carefully about what that audience will and won’t tolerate on a page. His guidance on writing for young readers was what I worked from. The subject was already there. Cyberbullying is a real problem for children now, and my sense at the time was that they had no answers available to them. That’s what I remember of the motivation, and I’d rather leave it there than construct a tidier origin story.
What does the cafeteria opening do in Jake and the Bullies?
It gets a young reader inside the experience before anybody has named it. Jake doesn’t know what the video is. He hasn’t seen it. He has a turkey sandwich that tastes like cardboard, because everything tastes like cardboard when you’re nervous, and he’s reading a room.
Giggling. Whispers. His name. Phones coming out. The sequence where somebody looks at a screen, then at him, then back at the screen.
Any child who has been on the wrong end of a room recognizes that in about four sentences, and recognition does more than any explanation could. A book that opens by explaining cyberbullying has already lost. Children’s books that lecture before they’ve won a single page of a kid’s attention waste the kid’s time. A book that opens with a boy who knows something is wrong and can’t yet see what has a reader who’s inside it.
There’s also a detail I put in and left alone. At the table nearest the door, a kid Jake has never seen before is reading an actual paper book. Jake notices it and immediately forgets about it.
Why put a kid inside the internet?
Because a boring story about being harassed online is a boring story, and there are a bazillion of them.
They’re written with good intentions. They’re assigned in classrooms. Children can identify one from across a room by the cover, and they know exactly what’s going to happen in it, and they don’t read it.
A kid who’s inside the internet is somewhat fresh. The reasoning goes no deeper than that. I wanted the subject handled in a way a young reader would find interesting enough to keep going, since a book about cyberbullying that gets abandoned on page nine helps nobody at all. So the internet becomes a place. Social Media City. The trolls have caves. The algorithms have addresses. There’s a gaming district where the landscape can’t decide what it is, medieval cobblestones one moment and laser fire the next, and a giant Pac-Man chasing three screaming ghosts down a side street.
Writing for this age is harder than writing for adults, and the difficulty is specific. An adult reader will stay with a slow chapter because they trust the book, or because they paid for it, or out of stubbornness. A ten-year-old won’t. Attention has to be earned continuously, and every page is a fresh negotiation about whether the book keeps going.
Which means the serious material has to ride underneath something enjoyable. The gaming district, the troll caves, the dragon and the boss battle carry the lesson, and without them I couldn’t have said anything at all about the thing the book is really concerned with. I think adults who dismiss that as sugarcoating have forgotten what it was like to be ten and bored.
Why is the villain in Jake and the Bullies a machine?
Because that’s closer to what a cyberbully is. A single antagonist would have been easier to write and would have misrepresented the thing. Give Jake one bully to defeat and the book becomes a story about winning a fight. That’s a lie about the situation and terrible advice for a child in it. The Hate Engine is a group bully. A faceless one. That’s often what cyberbullies are, and the facelessness is a large part of what makes them unbearable, because there’s nobody to confront and no single person to be angry at.
It also feeds. It runs on what kids feel when the comments arrive, so Jake’s distress is fuel. Working out how it feeds comes before doing anything about it, and the ordering is deliberate, because a child who understands the mechanism has something a child who’s simply hurt doesn’t.
What does Jake work out about fighting the Hate Engine?
Not to fight harder.
Inside the Hate Engine’s library are orbs of pain, and there’s kindness hiding inside each one. What finally works is a kindness virus, used on an extremely dangerous AI in the digital world, changing it instead of destroying it. A Rage Bot becomes KindBot and keeps some of its old navigation systems. That’s the sort of detail I enjoy and a young reader accepts without blinking.
I won’t walk through the ending. What matters for a parent deciding whether to hand this to a child is that the solution involves neither violence nor revenge, and the book arrives there across a lot of pages instead of announcing it as a moral. Stories that teach kids that the answer to cruelty is a bigger punch are wrong, and I wasn’t going to write one.
What happens after the battle in Jake and the Bullies?
Jake lies awake at 3:15 in the morning, staring at a ceiling that’s just a ceiling. He expected to feel amazing. He went inside the internet. He fought trolls and Mega-Trolls and a dragon and the living Hate Engine, and he won. What he feels is a mild case of the flu combined with having been hit by a bus. His ribs ache. His eyes burn. His hands still hold the ghost sensation of typing. And underneath it, quieter than everything else, is worry. About Kyle.
Kyle Brennan is the boy who made Jake’s life miserable and started all of this. During the final sequence, Kyle held the system together while everybody else ran, hands on the console, eyes rolled back. So Jake is lying there hoping the person who bullied him is all right, and he’s still working out how to feel about that when a message arrives from an account he doesn’t recognize.
That’s my favorite thing in the book, and it’s the part I’d point a young reader toward.
Did Richard Lowe plan for the bully in Jake and the Bullies to become a person?
No. This is one of those books that grew.
I didn’t start out writing it that way. Kyle began as the antagonist, and somewhere in the writing he stopped being only that, and by the end he’s at a cafeteria table with Jake and Tyler saying he needs to explain why he became the way he was, and saying he’s tired of keeping secrets.
The line on the sales page is his. I never had anyone show me there was another way.
That’s a heavy sentence for a book aimed at seven to fourteen year olds, and I left it in, because a child who’s being bullied is frequently also near a child who’s doing the bullying, and both of them are somebody’s kid.
Do bullying stories need a tidy ending?
No, and I was careful about that.
Three weeks after the ending, Roosevelt Middle School feels like a different place. Not perfect. School is never perfect. There are still kids who are mean, still drama, still all the usual things that make middle school feel like surviving a natural disaster on a daily basis. But something has shifted. Kids who used to share cruel memes share funny animal videos. Former enemies talk to each other.
Jake can’t tell if that’s what he did or people simply choosing differently. He decides it might be both, and the book leaves it there. The moment he notices is two seventh graders who ignored each other all year standing at a locker looking at a phone together, laughing. The real kind of laughing, not the mean kind. Such a small thing that he stands and watches it for a second, and then goes to class. One more thing about who the book is for, because the child being bullied is one reader of several. A parent handing this over is frequently doing so because something has already happened. The book has to work for that reader too: a child who’s currently in it, reading about a boy who’s currently in it, and who needs the story to not be hopeless without being dishonest about how hard it is.
Jake spends real chapters miserable. His best friend Marcus is there and can’t fix it. There’s a chapter called No Escape and it’s called that for a reason. None of that gets skipped over on the way to the fun part.
What the book offers is that there’s something to understand about how the thing works, and that understanding it changes what you can do. I’d rather give a frightened kid that than one more poster telling them to be brave. The platforms built the machinery that makes this cruelty so cheap and so fast, and a child shouldn’t have to carry the whole weight of surviving it alone.
What’s the reading order of Jake’s Internet Adventures?
It’s book one of Jake’s Internet Adventures, and the next one is Jake and the Chaos Collective.
It also sits alongside The Wild Tiger and the Answer Bot and its sequel in the same young adult group. They take on a different technology problem for the same readership.
The adult version of this subject is Sins of the Internet, and the household version is Family Cybersecurity. Same territory, three different readers, and the one for children is the hardest of the three to write, because the constraint is that they have to want to keep reading.
Of everything on that list, this is the book I’d most want in the hands of a kid having a bad year at school. Too many bullying stories for children tell a hurting kid to ignore it or go tell an adult and then leave them there, and I think that’s a failure of nerve by the people writing them. Jake gets hurt and then gets curious about how the thing hurting him works, and I wanted every kid living through it to see that happen.
