Dear Evan Hansen

Overall Content
Severity
3.9

Language

10.0/10

Alcohol, Drugs, Smoking

3.8/10

Intimacy, Sex, Immodesty

2.8/10

Violence, Weapons, Crime, Blood

1.0/10

Potentially Intense Themes

1.8/10

Dear Evan Hansen

Val Emmich

When a letter that was never meant to be seen draws high school senior Evan Hansen into a family’s grief over the loss of their son, Evan is given the chance of a lifetime: to belong. He just has to pretend that the notoriously troubled Connor Murphy was his secret best friend. Suddenly, Evan isn’t invisible anymore- even to the girl of his dreams. And Connor Murphy’s parents have taken him in like he’s their own, desperate to know more about their enigmatic son from his “closest friend.” As Evan gets pulled deeper into the family’s swirl of anger, regret, and confusion, he knows that what he’s doing can’t be right, but if he’s helping people, how wrong can it be?
Excerpt taken from book flap.

Language 

H***- 8

S***- 29

A**- 7

B****- 2

F***- 37

D***- 5

Bas****- 1

Religious Cursing-

J****- 2

Chr***- 2

G**- 11

Derogatory terms etc-

Dick- 5

Moron

A picture of someone flipping him off. 

Alcohol, Drugs, Smoking

A young man takes Lexapro and Ativan. 

A young man takes an Ativan feeling relief on the way.  Another time he takes one and doesn’t feel the effect. Later, he takes one and wills it to course through him.  He takes multiple throughout the book. 

The smell of smoke is on a young man’s hoodie. There’s also a rumor he got expelled for drugs. 

A young man takes Adderall to help with finals, he also has marajuana. But is mad because they put him on pills instead. He later uses those pills to assist in killing himself. 

In writing a letter, two young men talk about smoking crack then change it to pot. 

A man is nursing a scotch. 

A young man samples his dads scotch. He decides “Alcohol is my least favorite buzz.”

A teen boy is threatening to steal some alcohol during a meeting. He’s mostly joking. 

A young man gets caught with weed and worries he will lose his school placement. 

A young man is smoking weed and gets sent to rehab but that is where he picks up worse habits. 

Another rehab was a wilderness camp. Those kids were hard addicts. Barely functioning with weathered skin, eyes, teeth. 

Two young men get high. 

Joking, a young woman says they should ”throw a kegger.”

A young man invites another young man to his house to raid his parents liquor cabinet. 

Two moms have a glass of wine. 

A dad pours himself a drink.

A young man would go to a park and get high a lot. 

A young man gets drugs from a friend. 

A man keeps beers in his garage fridge. 

Intimacy, Sex, Immodesty

A young man sees high school teens making out in the hall. He notices it’s very wet. 

“Is it weird to be the first person in history to break their arm from jerking off too much? Paint me the picture. You’re in your bedroom. Lights off. Smooth Jazz in the background. You’ve got… Instagram…on your phone.”

A young man wonders how to make people see him. By handing out free condoms?

“I got to second-base-below-the-bra…”

A young man has changed out of his swimsuit in front of another young man. 

In asking if a young man is going to make a move on a young woman, a young man asks if he needs help locating her vagina. 

A young man wants to know if sending a letter to yourself is “some kind of sex thing?”

A young man says another young man is acting like a secret gay lover.  He jokes that their secret emails are to show pictures of their penises. 

Joking, a young man writes that he runs his fingers over his nipples every night thinking about another young man.

A young man looks across a gym, “look at the bumper on that one.”

“Your balls are the size of grapefruits.” “My balls are the size of poppy seeds.”

In the news there is a celebrity sex scandal. 

There is a rumor a teacher slept with a student or possibly the principal. 

A young man kisses a young woman briefly. Later, she kisses him. 

At a rehab, supposedly “…some people share…about sucking dick for meth.”

A young man meets his first gay person and they become friends. He is also “in-between” gay and straight. 

A young man takes a selfie and says it looks like someone about to commit a sex crime. 

Two young men lay on a bed talking. Later, one gets up and puts clothes on. No details. 

A young woman briefly kisses a young man twice at school. 

A brother and sister joke that two fits on the ceiling are nipples. 

Violence, Weapons, Crime, Blood

A young man pushes another young man, knocking him off his feet. 

In a fight last year, a young woman jumped on another young woman and said she was going to shove mashed potatoes up her. 

In second grade, a boy threw a printer at his teacher for not getting to be line leader. He later runs into a tree with his car because he “felt like it.”

On “idle nights,” a young man uses a lighter, matches and candle wax and burns his wrists. 

Upset, a young man pulls out chunks of his hair and punches his own head. 

A young boy throws a rock at his friends face. 

Potentially Intense Themes

A young man once laughed during the lesson of the Holocaust. 

A young man’s father left him and his mom when he was young. 

“Love the new hair length, very school-shooter chic.”

“Would anybody even notice if I disappeared tomorrow?”

A young man tries to imagine who of his classmates would be a school shooter. 

A young man takes his own life. Later, another young man tries to decide how he did it; gun, razor blade, pills, noose, carbon dioxide are what he considers. He had threatened to do it before. 

A young man considers unbuckling his seat belt and tumbling out onto the busy road. 

The young man who died can watch the life he left. He sees himself dead on the hospital bed and observed his family later in their house. He comes to an assembly held in his honor. He watches moments throughout the book. 

A young man hopes the bus driver of his bus will drive off a cliff. 

There was a fire long ago that killed a man’s wife and kids. 

A young man sits in the middle of the road debating on letting a car hit him. 

A young man falls out of a large tree, hoping it will kill him.  He does break a bone.

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