Dork Diaries 5 – Tales from a Not-So-Smart Miss Know-It-All

Rachel Renee Russell's Tales From a Not so Smart Miss-Know-It-All is a laugh-out-loud Dork Diaries story for 10 year olds that kicks off with a New Year's prank going horribly wrong.

What happens

It's New Year's Eve and Nikki is at a sleepover with her best friends, Chloe and Zoey. There's pizza, cupcakes, nail varnish and a game of Truth or Dare. Nikki picks dare (big mistake).

The dare is to toilet-paper the house of MacKenzie Hollister, the meanest girl at school. What could possibly go wrong? Well, MacKenzie's poodle needs a wee at exactly the wrong moment, in exactly the bush they're hiding in.

Reading Nikki's diary is like being right inside her head. Everything's in CAPS and exclamation marks, and the drama is turned all the way up. One minute she's sure she's about to be arrested. The next she's planning a candlelit birthday dinner for her crush Brandon at a burger bar.

Then it gets complicated. MacKenzie decides the prank was Brandon's way of showing he fancies her! And she's soon hinting she'll write about eggs nobody threw in her school-paper gossip column, unless she gets an invite to Brandon's party.

So Nikki does the only sensible thing. She joins the newspaper herself, so she can watch MacKenzie like a hawk. (Getting to see Brandon every day is purely a bonus, obviously.)

There's worry at home too. Her dad, who runs a bug extermination business, starts doing work for MacKenzie's dad. Nikki is terrified it'll cost her the scholarship that keeps her at her school.

This is a later book in the series and it mentions things from earlier ones, like an ice-skating show and a band with a very silly name. It still makes sense on its own. The insults flying between Nikki and MacKenzie are sharp, and the mean girl is very, very mean, which is half the fun.

If you've got a reader who loves a diary full of doodles, crushes and cringe, this is exactly their kind of book (with a LOT of squealing).

What to read next

If this is their first Nikki and they're hooked, the very first Dork Diaries book is where it all begins, on the day her mum gives her a diary instead of the phone she was begging for.