Common Sense Note

Parents need to know that the narrative begins with what looks like a prostitute visiting a half-naked man in a sex-for-money deal -- but it's a tease; she's a secretary and he's hired her to dictate a memoir. While a teen girl is a key character, this is very much a grown-up drama, about people prominent in London society, romance across (British) social-class lines, and Anglo-specific icons of the last ten years, like the Millennium Dome. If the most your kids know about England is what they get from Harry Potter, then the subtleties will escape them. Subplots concern parents mourning for a dead boy, or the possibility of a child's murder.

Sexual Content

A lovemaking session, with a buxom, topless woman seen from behind afterwards. Women in low-cut gowns at celebrations. Gideon and his daughter speak separately (she at a school assembly!) of the sexual conquests of a famed French author, and a stand-up comic tells a raunchy joke.

Violence

Minor scuffling, as a bereaved father attacks people on the street. A news report on TV about a string of murders.

Language

"Bastard" and "God damn." One especially taboo word from a stand-up comedian.

Social Behavior

Though Gideon Warner obsesses about the love and approval of his estranged daughter and the mistakes he's made with her, he is careless and apathetic about most of the other people in his life, except his new girlfriend Stella (an established lover he pretty much takes for granted, and she most agreeably fades away). Stella, for her part, is a quirky and pleasant divorced woman recovering from unbearable tragedy. She announces that she doesn't believe in God, never has, but attends a church choir faithfully in order to feel something. Gideon's daughter has strong environmentalist leanings, but is otherwise rather impenetrable.

Consumerism

Except for British tourism, maybe. There's a discernible effort to keep known products offscreen.

Drugs / Tobacco / Alcohol

Social imbibing.