Joel Swagman (Reviews / TESOL): Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney: Book Review

(Book Review--Children's Books, Does This Count as a Graphic Novel?)

Started: September 1, 2022

Finished: September 2, 2022

(This review is written using my new format for book reviews.)

Background Information

Originally published in 2009, this is the 4th book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series. (The 4th book within the 3rd year!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Wimpy_Kid#Chronology

Why I Read This Book

Last week I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) the original Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

At the end of that review, I said:

As you probably already know, there's a whole series of these books out now (see list on Wikipedia). My school library has several of them. I may check out a few more books from this series eventually. But I don't want to ruin it by doing it all at once. (Sometimes the humor of a particular author or cartoonist can get spoiled if you indulge too much too quickly). Maybe I'll give it a few weeks before checking out the next one.

But, I changed my mind. We had a 4 day holiday weekend here in Vietnam, I was looking for some light reading, and I thought to myself, "Well, after all, why not? If I'm having fun with this series, why not just continue?"

And so I went back to the shelves of the school library.

I had wanted to continue with the Wimpy Kid books in order, but the 2nd and 3rd books (Roderick Rules and The Last Straw, respectively) were not on the library shelves. (Either our library didn't have them, or someone else had them checked out. I never did bother to check the library database to see which it was.) And so, I jumped to the 4th book in the series: Dog Days.

The Reading Experience / Evaluation

With a series as prolific as Diary of a Wimpy Kid, (17 books and counting), I knew it was probably only going to be a matter of time before the author started running out of ideas, and the books began to decline in quality. But the question is, how long would it be before that happened?

Well, here we are. 4 books in, and the author has run out of ideas, and the books have declined in quality.

I wonder how the 2nd and 3rd books hold up. Was the drop off in quality immediate after the first book? Or was the decline more gradual? Maybe some day I'll get my hands on the 2nd and 3rd books, and then I can let you know. But for the moment, all I've got is the 4th book, so that's all I can talk about.

A number of the same ideas are recycled from the first book: once again, much of the plot is about the friendship between the main character (Greg Heffley) and his best friend (Rowley Jefferson). Once again, they have a fight, and then have to get reconciled. Once again, during Greg's fight with Rowley, the weird kid Fregley shows up as a possible substitute friend.

Once again, there's a comic strip in the paper that comes to an end, and once again Greg Heffley tries to submit his own comic as a replacement.

Once again, Greg Heffley has a lazily thought out get-rich-quick business plan, and ropes Rowley into it. And once again, the poorly thought out idea immediately falls apart on them.

To be fair, I don't know what else I really expected Jeff Kinney to do. He's locked into the same characters and settings from the first book. This whole series is exploring the drama of junior high school. It's not like Tintin where he can send Greg and Heffley to a new exotic location with every new book. There's probably only a limited number of stories he can tell with the setting he's got. (How in the world did he get 17 books out of this series? I'm almost tempted to read the whole thing just to find out.)

But... more than the recycled plot elements, the big thing is that this book just isn't that funny.

The first Diary of a Wimpy Kid was funny. I chuckled a lot while reading it. But there were no chuckles to be had while reading Dog Days.

Now, pinpointing exactly why something is funny, and why something is not, is always difficult to do. Some people who understand the mechanics of humor very well can do it, but I've never been one of those people. I usually just know when I laugh, and when I don't.

That being said, the one thing I can point to is that the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid was more grounded and realistic. It was the kind of thing you could totally imagine a junior high school kid doing or thinking, but just told in a humorous way.

Mostly. As I wrote in my original review, it could alternate between realistic and far-fetched. But the realistic elements were there.

But in Dog Days, it's mostly far-fetched. The main character does things that are so cringe that you can't imagine any real kid doing them.

Now, there is admittedly a kind of draw to cringe humor. There are a number of episodes in this book when Greg Heffley gets himself deeper and deeper into cringe situations, and as things get more and more cringe, there is a fascination with wondering how it will all blow up in his face, and what the big pay-off is going to be.

...except, there's never any big pay-off. Greg Heffley will just mention that someone got upset with him, or someone gave him a dirty look, or something like that, and that seems to be all the pay-off you get with this book.

So, although this book did hold my attention at the time, and did keep me turning the pages (I finished it in just one day), it also did leave me with a flat and empty feeling at the end. I didn't feel rewarded for having read this book, I just mostly felt let down.