In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a twelve year old boy named Greg Heffley has to survive the horrors of middle school AND his family. This realistic-fiction comedy is a masterpiece and is amazing. The reason I first wanted to buy it is that it looked interesting and cool, so I picked it up and was not disappointed. Even better, it’s the first entry of a long running series of books, so if you like this one, there are plenty of sequels!
One unique thing this book does is include doodles throughout the book by Greg himself. While Greg narrates the story, he includes doodles of what is actually happening along with the version that is just in his imagination. Since they're just doodles by a kid, they're not great pictures. They're just stick figure people doing stick figure things, but they are hilarious.
While dealing with fitting in at school, Greg deals with an older and jerky, music-loving bully of a brother at home. His other brother is much younger and, in Greg’s opinion, messes everything up at home. His mother smothers him, while his father barely has anything in common with any of his sons.
At school, Greg faces big troubles from a friend he thinks is dumb, another one he thinks is weird, and a gross, rotten, dirty piece of cheese that lays out on the school’s playground and curses anyone who touches it. If all that wasn’t enough, between the family and school problems, he even has to deal with a haunted house while being chased by bullies on Halloween.
Greg tries to do more than just survive middle school, he tries to become the most popular kid in his grade. However, he keeps messing up and falling lower and lower on the popularity scale. Each plan he devises to move up the list blows up in his face. He joins a Wizard of Oz play only to ruin it by accidentally knocking down the set. He was a talking tree in the play and even removed the plastic apples from his costume and threw them at people. Later he joined the school safety team, but even that backfired. He ends up putting little kids in danger and blames his best friend, ruining that friendship for a large portion of the book. Luckily, the two friends are reunited by that dirty piece of cheese.
I really enjoyed the book because of its interesting and strange characters. Greg isn't really a nice kid, he's very self-centered. I'd like to say he learns not to be like that, which he kind of does by making up with his friend, but he reverts back to that same self-centered kid in the sequel. Overall, the book is hilarious, it has amazingly crazy humor. I would recommend it to anyone.
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