The appeal of Wimpy Kid comes into focus when you hear a 14-year-old named Annie, also on This American Life, describing her relief at escaping from middle school, and the agonies she went through trying to avoid being a target of other kids while she was there. Kids get that Greg isn’t perfect, and I think that’s why they like him.” “I think adults who voice complaints about Greg’s shortcomings are missing the joke. “Greg is a deeply flawed protagonist.,” he told USA Today a couple of years ago. In fact Kinney celebrates Greg’s imperfections. He complains a lot about bullies- when he’s not bullying (or attempting to bully) others, including his on-again, off-again best friend. Greg records in his diary his (often unsuccessful) efforts to avoid being trashed by other kids who are cooler or bigger or more sophisticated than he is. “They’re just not as cute.”Ī good deal of what Wimpy Kid is about is the brutality of middle school, the baldly hostile and hurtful things kids do to each other at this age. “The terrible twelves are a complete analog to the terrible twos,” journalist Linda Perlstein, who’s written a book on the subject, tells This American Life in a broadcast about middle school. That’s why they can be merciless to anyone who’s different. That’s why they are both desperate to make friends and capable of turning on those friends savagely. They’re trying to figure out not only how their bodies work but who they are going to be and where they fit in. Kids are changing faster in these years of early adolescence than at any time since infancy. Consider the crazy physical changes kids undergo in these years, on wildly different timetables, resulting in kids like Greg, who look like boys, sitting in math class next to kids who look like men and (perhaps even more challenging to Greg) women. You could argue that middle school is a dark comedy waiting to happen. And one of the reasons his dead-pan humor is so tough to resist, at any age, is how darkly honest it is. Kinney sees himself as more a cartoonist than an author, and his drawings are, in themselves, laugh-out-loud funny. And it’s valuable, I think, to consider what makes this series such a monster hit with our kids.Ī lot has been written about the Wimpy Kids graphic novel format, which has appealed to millions of grade- and middle-schoolers who were previously unenthusiastic readers-especially, but not limited to, boys. Can it be: A massive bestseller about a kid with no superpowers in what may be the most awkward and painful of all the stages of life? That’s right. 5 in the series of Diary of a Wimpy Kid graphic novels by Jeff Kinney about the adventures of a not terribly prepossessing (and not all that admirable, either) middle school student named Greg Heffley.
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