How to use this Page

Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life. by Rachel Renee Russell. June 2, 2009. Aladdin. 282 pages. ISBN: 9781416980063

Nikki Maxwell is a fourteen-year-old eight grader and a self-proclaimed dork. She writes daily in her diary about the humiliations and injustices of her life at Westchester Country Day School, which she attends on scholarship thanks to her dad’s job as the school exterminator. In this first book in the Dork Diaries series, Nikki tells of her troubles with her locker neighbor, the perfect, but mean, McKenzie Hollister, and of her new friendship with the well-intentioned but also dorky Chloe and Zoey.

This book makes for very quick and easy reading. Nikki’s voice, though less snide and sarcastic than Jamie’s in the Dear Dumb Diary books, is appealing and relateable. I think Nikki’s experiences are pretty typical of what happens to many girls in middle school. The emotions of her daily dramas reminded me of things that happened to me in the mid-1990’s, and contemporary kids will recognize the added agony of not yet having a cell phone. There is also a lot of humor in the book. The manga-esque drawings often depict little jokes about McKenzie, or about Nikki herself, which really enrich the story and keep Nikki from becoming too much of a stereotype.

I did have a hard time buying that Nikki was fourteen. Somehow, she sounded much younger, in the same way that the Baby-sitters Club girls don’t really sound thirteen. I realize the younger-sounding narrative voice is meant to appeal to middle grade readers rather than teens, but I think it would have felt more natural to me had Nikki been presented as a 12-year-old. Every time her age was mentioned, I was surprised to remember that she was so old.

I’ve been reading books from both the Dork Diaries and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series in recent weeks, and it has made me wonder quite a bit about what makes them so popular. One thing that struck me when I was reading this particular book was the fact that the black and white illustrations allow the reader to impose any skin tone, hair color, or eye color onto the characters. I wonder if part of what makes the books so popular is that every kid can truly see herself in the characters. The author has told us (in this interview) - and I think she does in the books as well - that Nikki is Caucasian, Chloe is Hispanic, and Zoey (Zoeysha) is African-American, but since race isn’t a heavy theme in the book, readers could easily begin to imagine their own friends’ features when they think of these characters. There are obviously many more reasons kids enjoy these series, but I think there is something to be said for the possibilities presented by black and white drawings rather than full-color illustrations or none at all.

All in all, this book falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of “middle school experience” novels. It’s not quite as cheerful and saccharine as Nancy Krulik’s How I Survived Middle School series, nor it is as sardonic as Dear Dumb Diary. It strikes a happy medium between naivete and disillusionment, and provides a story that is at times cringe-worthy, but moreover entertaining and easy to breeze right through.