The Last Straw and Dog Days
These books are quite addictive, and are very quick to read, they may be over 200 pages but the combination of cartoons and the notebook style font make the word count on each page very low. Hence instead of reviewing one, here I’m reviewing two.
I read these out of order, Dog Days is #4 and I read it third, not that it really matters. There are currently 9 books in the Wimpy Kid series plus a few extras like the Do-It-Yourself book and the Movie Diary.
“Dog Days” is about Greg’s summer, Greg would be happy to laze around at home playing video games but his parents especially his mom, have other ideas. He goes with his friend Rowley to the beach. Greg dreams of riding a crazy ride called “The Cranium Shaker” but Rowley’s parents have the idea that the kids should be doing stuff like reading books….”I thought that was a good one, and I was about to tell Rowley that his mom was pretty funny. But she came back a second later with a bunch of reading material.”
If you have read “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” this is more of the same, juvenile humour, cartoons interspersed with a characteristic notebook style font, Greg our middle school diarist has great ideas for his summer which are invariably doomed to failure…
“The Last Straw” is the third volume of the series of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid“, here Greg’s father tries to get Greg to change his wimpy ways, enlisting him in organised sports and even pondering the idea of sending him to a military academy. But Greg is never going to change, like Calvin of the Calvin and Hobbes strip Greg has an aversion and ineptitude for organised sports, preferring to create his own amusement. Called on as a substitute in a football (soccer) game, Greg finds he is supposed to be in a wall for a free kick, well he didn’t do a great job and got bawled at by the coach, Greg notes in his diary: “But I’ll tell you what: If I have to choose between getting yelled at or getting hit in the face with a soccer ball, it’s no contest.”
My rating: 4 out of 5 (this seems to be my standard rating for the series…I’m now halfway through The Ugly Truth #5, so that puts me halfway through the series…there has been no stand out exceptional one so far, nor any particularly bad one for me, hence the same ratings for the first four).
jimholroyd365b 