Dork Diaries: TV Star by Rachel Renee Russell

Dork Diaries: TV Star by Rachel Renee Russell
Buy Dork Diaries: TV Star by Rachel Renee Russell at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: An unfortunate entrant to this series, when our favourite female middle school dork becomes a pop TV princess, and reality flies out the window.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 336	Date: June 2014
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Childrens Books
ISBN: 9781471117671
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Oh dear – Nikki Maxwell is on TV. It could be worse – her younger sister or her embarrassing parents could be on TV with her, but for now it's just her. And that's a problem. Several books after surprisingly winning the school pop talent contest, Nikki and her friends get a contact with a top entertainment supremo called in, and Nikki is thrust into the limelight of reality TV, and pop boot camp. But how can she possibly juggle that, and learning martial arts at school, and keeping all her friends and boyfriend happy, and avoiding the evil Mackenzie?

That sound you can probably hear is the noise of this series eating itself. Before now it's been perfectly fine that Nikki shares all her problems with us, and she always comes through as a winsome, likeable dork, what with the way she piles pressure on herself over boyfriend Brandon, and has to try and not rise to the bitchiness of the evil Mackenzie. But here the fun is lost with her complaints. There was always a way you could look on this series, certainly from the great height of my advanced age, as a cheesy irony-fest, with Nikki's hyperactive writing style, full of smiley faces, multiple exclamation marks and her just going SQUEEEEEEE!!!! being a warm-hearted, realistic look at the problems of middle school America for the common or garden dork.

Not now. This isn't quite a real shark jump, but it is close – Nikki ending up on a reality soap show, and one that seems to be invented, contractually set up, filmed and aired in about four days. We lose a lot of connection with her and her quibbles with life when she's talking to her diary about being too busy. Heck, she's too busy what with exams for this, that and the other, singing lessons, recording sessions, and creating a CD (what were they, again?) all month, that she can only write a squillion words into her diary for our edification. And give every couple of pages a full-on, large, Disneyfied comic illustration.

The actual structure that that diary format gives to the whole franchise has not been lost, nor the fun look at the dramas of her life, whether inspired by Brandon or the evil girl nemesis. It's still just as easily consumed for the female reluctant reader, although I did notice a few more times where the illustrations had speech bubbles or captions that were relevant to the text, when they might have been disposable and thrown away in the past, which raises the problem for some perhaps of reading the bland and needless captions and getting their flow distracted.

So this is definitely the Dork Diaries as we know and like them, or it certainly is for those who have carried on from the start. Certainly if you're starting now you're on a hiding for nothing, as this is the wrong place to join in. But the main issue is that with this series entrant Nikki has left reality so far behind (irony, again, when it's for the sake of reality TV) that we lose the link with her. The series might as well make her an astronaut next time round, for the remove here between the reader and the content is just too great. (In fact, I might be on board for that – Brandon as George Clooney to Nikki's Sandra Bullock, and Mackenzie swanning around not getting killed and wearing a snazzier spacesuit than anyone else.) The reality of the actual construction of the diary is flawed, the link between the Everygirl character and the reader is broken, and for the first time I'm concerned about the immediate future, as well as the long-term length, of this series. It was never dreadful, and I don't think the cycle will ever near that, but this is definitely one Dork that needs bringing back to earth with a bump.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

The aforementioned talent show was in Pop Star. For a richer look at something closer to music bizz reality, there is Rock War by Robert Muchamore - but be warned it's not exactly a straight overlap in audience.

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