Skating Sensation (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renee Russell
| Skating Sensation (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renee Russell | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: The fourth adventure in this amusing series - not perhaps the most well-crafted, but still a breezy joy at best. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 368 | Date: June 2012 |
| Publisher: Simon and Schuster | |
| ISBN: 9780857071194 | |
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OMG!! Niki's gym class is doing ice-skating this term, and anyone who presents a display at a public charity event will get a straight A. Also, if she can perform well she will keep an endangered animal charity working for some months. It's just a shame then that Niki suits ice-skating as well as chocolate suits building barbecues. What's worse, is that the shelter has a deep meaning for her hunky friend Brandon...
The adult critic can begin to see a little bit of a laissez-faire attitude in this fourth entry to the series. It seems to follow straight on from the third but also refers back to book 3 and a half, somehow. The very amusing comedy set piece midway through seems to be apropos of nothing, until it most clearly fits hand in hand with the ending, but nothing is done to point that out - one sentence would do it, and it needn't have been patronising. Similarly, there's a whimsical maxim courtesy of Niki and her homework habits, which should have been given a resulting grade or something, and at the moment is just left hanging.
I'm not sure too about the way Ms Russell is drawing her characters with black arms and large white hands - I've not noticed it before, but it seems to be a way to point to Disney and say 'hey, you draw mice like that, now come and make a moving image version of this!'.
Which brings me on to my main points. There are still no real flaws to this series, and I see no problem still in comparing this with the male counterpart, featuring the Wimpy Kid. The only reason that has hit the cinemas and this hasn't is that girls and boys make his audience, while this franchise remains... a little too spangly, a little too twee, a little too SQUEEEEEE!!.
Some cynics would point out that you don't need so many smileys, so many OMG!!s and suchlike Internet abbreviations of the language, but this is purely there for realism. The books do not preach the use of this as a way of writing, and the 'proper' text is always well done. Here the series treads a little on old ground, with a public embarrassment for Niki, and the horrid school bitch causing problems, but it is jaunty enough to include typically American Holiday mawkishness, old-fashioned farce elements and decent modernisms that don't grate, in a style that never looks dull on the page.
Given a plot that does a bit more than mirror previous adventures, given a bit more comedic craft as regards what are called 'callbacks', and perhaps given a plot covering a bit more than a month (just how many of these are there going to be?!) I might have rated this at the regular four stars. But Ms Russell is no dork, and for the target audience at least it will be smileys all round again.
For a much more boyish, British version of this kind of thing, we recommend May Cause Irritation (The World of Norm) by Jonathan Meres. Boyish, you ask? It's got lots of poo in, we explain...
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Dork Diaries by Rachel Renee Russell in Chronological Order
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