Diary of a Wimpy Kid – The Long Haul

Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid The Long Haul is a very funny holiday diary for 9 year olds, and this time the whole Heffley family is squashed into one minivan.

What happens

Greg's summer plan is simple. Stay indoors with the TV remote and the air con. Then Mum announces a road trip, lifted straight out of her favourite family magazine (she wants everything "authentic", whatever that means).

Dad's old boat comes too, towed behind and stuffed with whatever won't fit in the van. Screens are banned. Greg smuggles his pillow.

It goes wrong almost at once. The first motel is grim. A family with a very hairy dad keeps turning up wherever the Heffleys go, and Greg has a good reason to hide from them.

Then at a country fair, little brother Manny guesses a hog's weight exactly and wins a real live piglet. Who wins a pig on a family holiday?

The pig rides in the cool box. It raids the hotel minibar. It bites Greg, so he ends up being seen by a vet (the form Mum fills in lists his species as human). And later a seagull hops in through the sunroof after a cheese curl, which ends in feathers everywhere and a bump with the car in front.

Halfway through, Mum decides the trip should work like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, with the family voting at every junction. Greg's not convinced, because in those books he never picks the choice with the happy ending.

Reading it is like flicking through Greg's own notebook. Nearly every page is his handwriting on lined paper with a cartoon or two, and LOTS of the jokes are in the drawings. Capitals do the shouting, and sound words like SPLOOSH and HONK get a picture to themselves. It's a long book, but the pages fly by, and if your reader can manage a chapter book alone they'll race through it.

The fun is Greg's version of events. Everyone else is the problem, and he never quite spots his own part in it. Rodrick is at his most big-brotherly too (his trick with a paper place mat at the water park is just mean).

This one's the ninth Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. Greg explains the family as he goes, so it works fine on its own.

What to read next

If a summer holiday going wrong is their kind of joke, try Dog Days from earlier in the series. Greg wants that summer spent indoors with the curtains shut, and Mum's got other ideas there too.