Dork Diaries: Once Upon a Dork (Book 8) by Rachel Renee Russell
| Dork Diaries: Once Upon a Dork (Book 8) by Rachel Renee Russell | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: While a series like this is to be applauded for trying something so very different, this fantasy fairy-tale experiment does not quite work as well as it should. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 320 | Date: July 2015 |
| Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Books | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781471143830 | |
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There is wishing you had a fairytale relationship, and/or having the chance to change your life drastically – and then there is being able to see what would actually happen if either wish came true. Nikki wakes up on a typical school day with a hellish start – no alarm clock, due to her younger sister, sandwich all over her jumper, again due to her younger sister, and so on, and so she can only wish for something to take her out of it and give her a dollop of fantasy. That something is dodgeball, which bangs her on the head so much she wakes up in a sheer fantasy world, where her BFFs are Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood, the world is peopled by other folk from school, but her hunky friend Brandon is still Prince Charming, and her enemy Mackenzie Hollister is still able to make her life hell…
You only have to read this kind of book a few times to see one of the problems the weaker ones come up against – that of detail. One end of the seesaw has you not learning anything and skipping through the world of the book, the other end has the alternative dip of so much detail, of the narrator's life being so itemised they would never have time in the day to either live it or write it up. The book to hand seems to be suffering from the latter – page 57 and we've only gone from waking up to 11:05am. How on earth could Nikki be active and still writing everything up? It's only at that stage you realise the 'Once' in the title refers to the one-day only nature of the story as much as it does the typical fantasy world featured.
It's just a disappointment the fantasy world is so close to mediocre. I'm sure regular readers of the series will agree with me that there is enough drama inherent in Nikki's life, and enough swings from will-they to won't-they and back again as to whether or not she gets with Brandon. There is some fun to be pointedly declaring him to be Prince Charming – as if we didn't know that – but there is not a lot of value in taking the whole book into such a rarefied world. Where this is just another way to show them not quite succeeding in their relationship, there was a huge, gaping chasm of archness, with which the fairy tale could have been sent up something rotten.
Instead it's just done straight, and too earnest – the Carrollinian Queen quick with the execution of her mock trials, and a bit of Oz thrown in as well. There is some cleverness in this mish-mash, but to me it was too straight, too plain, and too much a case of jumping the shark to make the series sustained. At the end of this book it's Nikki and someone else who have changed, and the calendar marking down her path into Brandon's arms is only the one day along. That day has novelty, for sure, but it might not have been what we wanted.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Following this, this extended series gave us the Drama Queen episode, which was a much more successful yet equally surprising change to the norm.
Dork Diaries by Rachel Renee Russell in Chronological Order
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You can read more book reviews or buy Dork Diaries: Once Upon a Dork (Book 8) by Rachel Renee Russell at Amazon.com.
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