Diary of a Wimpy Kid – Old School

Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid Old School is a very funny diary for 9 year olds about a boy who's quite glad he wasn't alive in the good old days.

What happens

Greg's mum thinks everyone spends far too long on their phones. So she starts a petition, and before long the whole town has agreed to switch off for a weekend. Greg isn't convinced. Nobody in those old black-and-white photos is smiling, after all (and nobody had baby wipes either).

Home is already a squash. Grandpa has moved in and taken Greg's bedroom, so Greg's on an air bed on his little brother Manny's floor. Dad's watching Greg like a hawk, and Greg's pretty sure there's a camera hidden in Manny's stuffed duck.

His plan is to be the one kid who stays behind when his class heads off for a week at Hardscrabble Farms. Log cabins, farm chores, no electronics and no junk food. No thanks!

Then a toothpaste cap goes down the bathroom sink. What follows is a flood, a drive with Grandpa that goes VERY wrong and a car in a ditch. Suddenly a week out of town sounds like a great idea.

Camp is everything Greg feared. Tonight's stew is made from the last meal's leftovers, in the same pot they used thirty years ago. And everyone's whispering about Silas Scratch, the farmer who's meant to be prowling the woods. Is he real? No spoilers here, but the rumours get sillier by the day.

Greg is never the hero of his own story, which is half the fun. When the lemonade stand flops he sells plain water as NRG Fitness Water. When a man who isn't exactly in shape offers to vouch for it, Greg pays him three dollars to say he DIDN'T drink it.

It's a very easy read for a child on their own. The pages look like a real diary, with handwritten-style lettering on lined paper and a cartoon on nearly every page. A lot of the jokes are in the pictures. Words in capitals show exactly where Greg's voice goes up a notch, and each entry is short and dated, so it's easy to stop and start.

If your reader likes a narrator who's completely sure he's right while everything falls apart around him, this one's a treat.

What to read next

It's the tenth book in the series but it doesn't lean on the others. If Greg's family wins them over, go back to the first Wimpy Kid book and meet him right from the start.