Dork Diaries: Party Time by Rachel Renee Russell
| Dork Diaries: Party Time by Rachel Renee Russell | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: The trials and tribulations of a girl with an inferiority complex, and a Halloween ball's success resting on her comedic decisions. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 288 | Date: August 2010 |
| Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Books | |
| ISBN: 978-1847387424 | |
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This is the second in the series of 'Wimpy Kid' for girls books, full as usual of comic cutaways to cartoon strips, illustrations, OMGs, BTWs, BFFs, smileys and over-used exclamation marks!!!!! It's October, and Nikki is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The place is the school's Halloween Ball, ideally with Brandon, the crush of her life for this term at middle school. The rock is as usual the evil Mackenzie, the Cruella de Vil of snobbish, bullyish school bitches. Can Nikki resolve her dilemma - just for the fortnight this diary spans, and get her beau to the ball - especially when she double-books herself?
Books like these are great for the reluctant reader in the eight and above age bracket - barely two hundred words a page, the lined format and handwriting font of a kid's diary, and kinetic yet readable design of illustrations and captions, and main script. However I think this example is not quite as great as it could have been. I read the first hundred pages looking for a great chapter-ending punchline in vain. I saw too easy manipulation of our emotions as regards evil Mackenzie, and hunky Brandon. It's nothing if not totally unsubtle.
But at the same time there are multiple hits. The jokes are paced and targetted at the right audience, and come off the page well - I don't know how religiously this has all been laid out but the bum-flaps (don't ask) coming as they do at the top of their new page is ideal comic timing.
I still think the shallow self-deprecation of Nikki helps the author put less in each day than does her male counterpart, but girls might disagree, and I'm not in a position to find out. This is a book that appears a shallow, throwaway collection of the most blunt and obvious to an adult, but is still an amusing type of guilty pleasure. And when it shows off its merits well, such as subtly animating a wall poster, or giving us an OTT group sob, or hits its stride with the entr-acte about the fairy spray or in the huge set-piece climax, it shows why it's very capable of being very popular.
I must thank Simon and Schuster's kind people for my review copy.
The series began here.
This book and the first book in the series are available in one volume.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Dork Diaries: Party Time by Rachel Renee Russell at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
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