Accidental Aesop: The story implies that a person is only good if he sticks to the norm and stays idle.
Angst? What Angst?: Characters tend to underreact to a lot of things. For example, at the height of his "evil", Zyn apparently has taken to stealing from the Muggles, injuring them, setting fire/blowing things up, and psychologically breaking various Muggles into being his lackeys. The author even calls him a "terrorist". The rest of the Muggles act like he's a standard rebellious teenager, shaking their heads and referring to his behavior as "naughty pranks".
Anvilicious: According to the original prologue, the nuclear wars could ultimately be traced back to the abuse of eminent domain laws...which, according to the author, are inherently evil anyway.
Audience-Alienating Premise: A cutesy children's book set in a post-apocalypse world is a hard pill to swallow but not one you can't shove down. A narrative that switches between cutesy kindergarten stuff and seriously messed up geopolitics, on the other hand...
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: This is a rare case where entire chapters are BLAMs. Some examples include gags about Yur's deafness, all but one tales from the Ancient Book of Tales (only the "Year of the Voyagers", which indicates how to build boats, is actually useful to the story), Golda's poem, and the "Chef Franc" line uttered by Zyn.
Designated Hero: Rah, who does absolutely nothing to try to help Zyn when he goes off on his downward spiral. Even after we're told that Zyn is forcing Muggles into submission to obey him and attacking other people, Rah doesn't do a freaking thing! Heck, Rah never does anything heroic at all!
Designated Villain: The book makes every effort to make readers believe that Zyn is a horrible person, even calling him and his followers "terrorists" at one point. The only things he actually does is acting ridiculously nasty towards his followers and planning to move to an island.
Esoteric Happy Ending: Rah is saved and the Muggles are happy again...except that Zyn is still trapped in a cave with his starving Nevils and is afraid to leave out of fear of the Shadow Monsters.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Sometime after the lawsuit debacle, the novel was translated in Czech and published by Adonai in the Czech Republic. It is the only known translation.
Harsher in Hindsight: The backstory is that the United Nations analogue took over and the military militias "fighting for democracy" retaliated. While crazy right-winger militarism has always existed, the political landscape of the 2010's would ensure that Stouffer would not be ignored in the worst way possible.
Narm: There's no indication that a story about how eminent domain laws destroyed the world, how the Muggles basically evolved from eugenics targets, how a psychotic abuser treated as a schoolyard bully and how someone stutters even in his inner thoughts was meant to be anything other than sincere.
The "Spooners of the deep". As we never learn anything about them (other than that they live in water) Their name sounds like they're just creatures with spoons or the like.
Overshadowed by Controversy: The book would have remained extremely obscure had Nancy Stouffer not sued J. K. Rowling over the use of the word "muggles" in the Harry Potter books. There has been more media coverage about the lawsuit than the book itself.
Padding: Lots of it, but two examples are especially bad standouts:
A chapter dedicated to ripping off the Fawlty Towers episode "Communication Problems".
A five-page poem that doesn't advance the plot, or even scan properly, and is bad enough to make a Vogon cringe.
Strangled by the Red String: Lady Catherine falls in love with Walter right after her husband died in a war.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The "plot" is disjointed and incoherent because of its tendency to skip random years between chapters, missing countless storytelling opportunities along the way.
Zyn used to be a normal person until all attention went to Rah, and when he does one good thing (saving his brother after he passed out in the cave), he gets scolded for getting into trouble, and it only got worse from here. Anyone who has dealt with depression will cope with Zyn and justify his actions.
The Nevils are an egregious case, because they used to be regular Muggles whose conscience was broken by Zyn. Even though the Muggles, especially their families, know this, they do nothing to bring them back to normal.
Rah is treated as the hero because he conforms to a sect-like society he isn't part of, doesn't take Zyn out of his depression and does everything for the Muggles without questioning, like fetching birds and building an irrigation mill. The Muggles only save him and do nothing about Zyn and the Nevils, because they decided they're the bad guys.
The Muggles themselves, especially Yur, Golda and Nona. They are ultimately responsible for Zyn's depression: first, they pass it off as just a phase that goes away by itself, and then prevent Rah from stopping his destructive behavior.
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Sum all the nonsense, bizarre imagery, questionable morals and bad writing, and you'll get something that's hardly readable to its target audience (children from 6 to 12). The premise in particular is something you'd expect from a sci-fi setting (either serious horror or parody); there's a reason why nuclear devastation is very rarely handled in books aimed at preschoolers.
