Eievie
Since: Feb, 2014
12/06/2017 04:02:22
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Literature Great at all ages
I first bought the Dear Dumb Diary books at a book fair when I was in elementary school. I've been reading them ever since, and I'm in college now.
They're ridiculous, and uproariously funny, and have more character development and depth than you'd first think. I adored them then, and I adore them now.
Literature One of my favorite sitcoms...yes, really.
As a young boy, Dear Dumb Diary was a guilty pleasure...in that I loved the books but was aware that looked weird to other people because I was a boy. But I never got rid of the books or stopped reading them, and I no longer feel any shame in proclaiming them to be great.
Dear Dumb Diary is a middle-school series with narration and illustrations like many that would become common in the genre, but none of them quite do what these books do. I remember thinking they were hysterical as a kid, but they just got funnier as I got older due to the satirical yet warm tone the books take. Protagonist Jamie Kelly is a snarky commenter on the middle-school experience, and she has a lot to say about her condition as a not-super-popular student, but there's also a lot that older readers clearly see she's missing. Jamie takes middle school drama extremely seriously, and yet the books are written with the adult awareness of how silly the tribalism and affairs of middle schoolers can be, creating comedy out of how certain things are treated with import that is in fact ridiculous. And yeah, the books are hilarious. Jamie's outlook on the world paired with her silly and often grotesque illustrations often lead to laugh-out-loud prose and imagery, and the books are like well-developed episodes of a sitcom with converging plot points that you'd never have expected to connect until the finale. These books have always made me laugh, but I've appreciated their sturcture and wit more as I grew older. I also love that the series feels very genuine and grounded for the work of a man writing middle-school girls. They don't feel like an alien or sexist writing female characters under any ideal; they just feel like people.
Another thing I really respect about the books is the sense of character development. Frequently, characters are introduced as one-note (the pretty popular girl, the boy everyone wants, the bully, the mean cafeteria monitor, the forgettable kid) but then, over the course of single or several books, Jamie learns more things about the people in her life and they gain more nuanced portrayals. Her relationship with the pretty, popular Angeline is a consistent throughline that sees Jamie begrudgingly reappraising Angeline and coming to accept that people love her for good reasons...and this is great, because Angeline's kindness and mature outlook play great against Jamie and her best friend Isabella's narrow outlooks (and Isabella's evil genius...it's a thing). I love nuance-based messages of empathy for people, and it's a great complement to the theme of how ridiculous tribalism and stereotyping in a middle-school setting can be.
These books are great. They're a fantastically hilarious sitcom for all ages, and they promote messages of nuance and human connection as well. Seek them out. You'll probably enjoy it.