Dear Dumb Diary

Dear Dumb Diary is a series of children's novels by Jim Benton. Each book is written in the first person view of a middle school girl named Jamie Kelly. The series is published by Scholastic in English and Random House in Korean. Film rights to the series have been optioned by the Gotham Group.^[2]

The series follows the adventures of Jamie Kelly at Mackerel Middle School.

Characters[edit]

Main[edit]

• Jamie Kelly – an awkward, easily embarrassed middle school girl who owns the diary and narrates the stories. She is passionate about art and glitter and is generally thought of as weird or eccentric. She loves koalas and has a fear of clowns. Jamie typically has a very sarcastic nature and enjoys teasing and deriding those around her in her diary. While most of this is lighthearted, she particularly enjoys putting down her favorite targets including adults (which she even speculated are not human at one point) and authority figures such as her teachers and school staff, her friend Angeline, the lunchroom monitor Ms. Bruntford, the bully Mike Pinsetti, her dog Stinker, and on occasion her best friend Isabella, among many others. Named after Jim Benton, whose full name is James Kelly Benton. ^[3]
• Isabella Vinchella – Jamie's mean and hotheaded best friend who is often manipulative, foul-tempered, prone to intimidation tactics, and even outright unpleasant. Regardless of these traits, Jamie insists on being her friend throughout everything, even admiring her for her violence as they became friends when Isabella beat up a boy for making fun of her name, and Jamie complimented her by comparing her to a "dangerous little mousetrap that you shouldn't put your fingers in". She is a master of faking injuries to frame her two mean older brothers for inflicting them.
• Angeline – a beautiful and popular girl who, despite seeming to embody the mean popular girl stereotype in earlier books, is actually very nice and loves donating to charities. She considers herself a very good friend of Jamie and her Aunt Carol and Uncle Assistant Principal Devon, and has helped them multiple times, despite Jamie believing she is plotting against her. In "Am I The Princess Or The Frog?" she is revealed to be Jamie's kindergarten friend known as "Annie" due to a speech impediment. Her last name is unknown but her father's name is known to be Angelo.

When writing about why she hates Angeline, Jamie often describes, in elaborate detail, Angeline’s kindness, beauty, intelligence, and other positive qualities. Because of this, the seemingly superficial nature of their shared crush on Hudson, and other factors, some readers have interpreted Jamie as a closeted lesbian with a tsundere crush on Angeline. Jim Benton stated:^[4]

Your work can land in ways you can't predict. I always tried to write Jamie as a person who was forever discovering new things about herself and the people around her-and she was very often wrong at first. I'm certain that Jamie has all sorts of discoveries ahead of her.

Major[edit]

• Stinker – Jamie's old and overweight male beagle, known for farting (hence the name) who despite Jamie believing him to be ugly and stinky, is very much well-loved. He is believed to have died in the book "Dear Dumb Diary Deluxe: Dumbness Is A Dish Best Served Cold" after swallowing Jamie's late grandmother's bracelet, but a miracle surgery funded by Jamie, Isabella and Angeline's partnership with the salad dressing company saves his life.
• Aunt Carol – Jamie's beautiful aunt who works as a secretary in Mackerel Middle School and is married to Uncle Assistant Principal Devon. While they were still dating, the identity of Devon as Aunt Carol's boyfriend was kept a secret, and Jamie kept force-feeding Stinker beans as an excuse for her to leave her room because of the smell, so she can eavesdrop on her mother and Aunt Carol's conversations. This does not succeed. In the book "The Problem With Here Is That It's Where I'm From", Isabella successfully tricks Aunt Carol into believing long white wedding dresses are no longer in style and that wooden clogs and brown poofy dresses are the latest fashion among young brides of Hollywood.
• Uncle Assistant Principal Dan Devon – Jamie's uncle and assistant principal of Mackerel Middle School, who is also Angeline's uncle on her mother's side, making Angeline Jamie's cousin-in-law. Jamie is disgusted by the marriage making her somehow related to Angeline and on occasion has tried to separate them.
• Jamie's mother – known for her horrible cooking which she attempts to force onto her daughter and husband, nevertheless she makes decent hors d'ouvres. In the book "You Can Bet On That" she is also known for making horrible clothes which she forces onto her daughter, husband and Isabella, described as looking like "monkey vomit". As Jamie puts it: "If we were to take three feet of wrappings off a decaying mummy, drag it through a pigsty, dip it in toad slobber, and leave it at the bottom of a birdcage for six years, we would have a tie that would still be a thousand times better- looking than that smeary mess you have tied around your neck right now." Aside from her gross cooking and fashion sense she is a decent person. Her sister who likes annoying her is Aunt Carol.
• Jamie's father – generally a very gross person as well as boring (at least according to Jamie). He can never get names right and constantly calls Stinker "Jamie" and vice versa. He also calls Isabella "Isadora" and Angeline "Angela" despite being corrected multiple times.
• Stinkette – one of a litter of 4 puppies whose parents are Stinker and Angeline's dog Stickybuns. Jamie adopts her due to her resemblance and attachment to her father.
• Hudson Rivers – a boy who both Jamie and Angeline have a crush on despite Hudson being said to be the "eighth cutest boy in the school" and not being romantically interested in either of them, instead having a crush on Isabella.
• Mike Pinsetti – an unpleasant bully character, described as a "human sack of turds", who likes making poorly-thought-up nicknames for every student in the school. He is somewhat afraid of Angeline, who punched him when he called her "big weird thing", as was revealed in the book "Dear Dumb Diary Deluxe: Dumbness Is A Dish Best Served Cold". He has a crush on Jamie which she justifiably rejects.
• Colette – a girl from Wodehouse Middle School who was constantly bullied due to various incidents (in particular one where she laughed so hard while eating spaghetti that it shot out of her nose and the school nurses tried to see if it was a vein or intestine while the "whole world of her school" watched) and as result she has no friends. As revenge she placed rotting cat food in her school's ventilation causing the school to be shut down temporarily. During that period, she is transferred to Mackerel Middle School where she befriends Isabella, Jamie and Angeline.
• Ms. Bruntford – the school's cafeteria monitor who forces everyone to eat her disgusting meatloaf on Thursdays. Jamie often jokes about her fatness, even stating she could have her own planetary orbit. In the book "Am I The Princess or the Frog?" she eats her own meatloaf and faints while yelling, "Call 911!" While Bruntford recovers, Jamie's mother is called on to be the acting cafeteria monitor but her meatloaf is far worse, this is believed to be a set-up by Bruntford to make her own meatloaf look better by comparison. She becomes Isabella's co-conspirator in the attempt to stop Ms. Anderson from coming to Devon and Carol's engagement announcement party.
• Ms. Valerie Anderson – Jamie's favorite teacher who becomes the main antagonist of "Can Adults Become Human?" The art teacher who is in love with Uncle Assistant Principal Devon and despises Aunt Carol. Before finding out Devon is engaged to Carol, she presents the students with an assignment to make an anonymous valentine card, of which Jamie's card ends up being used by Anderson to ask Devon out to lunch, which he throws in the trash. Enraged by this outcome, Anderson attempts to ruin Devon and Carol's engagement announcement party, but Bruntford and Isabella, feeling sorry for Aunt Carol, pop her car tires before she can arrive. Furthermore, Angeline appears asking to help Anderson replace her tire but then lies about losing the nuts, implying she too is part of the conspirancy. Anderson arrives via tow truck and seems to be on surprisingly good terms with Devon and Carol, seemingly having fallen in love with the tow truck driver.
• Margaret – a nerdy, unpopular girl with a habit of pencil-chewing. In the book "My Pants Are Haunted" she is given a makeover by Jamie and Isabella, including wearing a pair of high-end BellAzure jeans, and becomes unexpectedly more popular than Jamie, Angeline and Isabella. This, together with an incident where the jeans made a fart noise while Jamie wore them in front of Hudson, led Isabella and Jamie to believe the pants were demonically possessed, hence the book title. It is revealed the reason for Margaret's popularity wasn't because of the jeans, but because of a bottle of Isabella's perfume concoction snuck into Margaret's bag by another girl named Sally so she could test its effects and hopefully use the perfume to get with Hudson.
• T.U.K.W.N.I.F. – short for "That Ugly Kid Whose Name I Forget", Jamie's nickname for a shy, introverted unpopular boy in her school who she considers the absolute pinnacle of hideousness, also called "That One Kid". In the book "That's What Friends Aren't For", he plays the piano with Jamie's art piece attached to its front during the art show. When Jamie's mother calls him "Tuck or Tuckster", Jamie suspects that his name is indeed "Tukwnif", but it is revealed to actually be "Tucker".
• Emmily – or Emily, a dim-witted but friendly and innocent girl who wins Jamie's "best friend auditions" designed to keep Angeline from stealing Isabella's attention from Jamie. She spells her name with two M's because she loves M&M's, not because of the M markings on the chocolates but because of the "mmm" sound she makes while eating them.
• Isabella's Two Older Brothers – who are mentioned but never actually seen. Described as "enemies who live in her house", they often like to bully and harass her, and in turn are framed for Isabella's injuries that she fakes.
• Mr. VanDoy – Jamie's social studies teacher who seemingly never smiles. However, when Stinker finally farts after 3 weeks of built-up gas from being forcefed beans in Jamie's failed attempt to eavesdrop, causing everyone at Devon and Carol's engagement announcement party to evacuate, VanDoy is the first to laugh about it.
• Angeline's Mother – whose brother is Uncle Assistant Principal Devon. She is described as being as bad at hair as Jamie's mother is at cooking and fashion. She attempted to style her daughter's hair, resulting in a bizarre-looking hairstyle that led to constant bullying during kindergarten, with Jamie being her only friend. Angeline had to learn extensively how to style her own hair after that, inventing such techniques as "zone-shampooing" (applying different scented shampoos to areas of her hair).

Reception[edit]

Critical reception for the series has been mixed,^[5] with Publishers Weekly writing that the lead character "makes the occasional funny observation, more often her stabs at humor miss their mark or are so protracted that the comic moment fizzles".^[6] A reviewer for the Indian Express compared My Pants are Haunted! to the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, saying that fans of Wimpy Kid would like the series.^[7]

Books[edit]

Year One[edit]

• 1. Let's Pretend This Never Happened (July 1, 2004)
• 2. My Pants Are Haunted! (October 1, 2004)
• 3. Am I the Princess or the Frog? (June 1, 2005)
• 4. Never Do Anything, Ever (November 1, 2005)
• 5. Can Adults Become Human? (May 1, 2006)
• 6. The Problem With Here Is That It's Where I'm From (July 1, 2007)
• 7. Never Underestimate Your Dumbness (March 1, 2008)
• 8. It's Not My Fault I Know Everything (January 1, 2009)
• 9. That's What Friends Aren't For (January 1, 2010)
• 10. The Worst Things In Life Are Also Free (June 1, 2010)
• 11. Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers (January 1, 2011)
• 12. Me! (Just Like You, Only Better) (June 1, 2011)

Year Two[edit]

• 1. School. Hasn't This Gone Long Enough? (January 1, 2012)
• 2. The Super-Nice Are Super-Annoying (June 1, 2012)
• 3. Nobody's Perfect. I'm As Close As It Gets (January 1, 2013)
• 4. What I Don't Know Might Hurt Me (June 25, 2013)
• 5. You Can Bet on That (May 27, 2014)
• 6. Live Each Day to the Dumbest (May 26, 2015)

Deluxe[edit]

• 1. Dumbness is a Dish Best Served Cold (June 28, 2016)

Movie[edit]

A film version had been filmed in Salt Lake City, Utah, starring Emily Alyn Lind as Jamie and Mary-Charles Jones as Jamie’s best friend Isabella.

The movie premiered on Hallmark Channel on September 6, 2013, and is now available on streaming services like Netflix.

See also[edit]

• Adrian Mole
• Diary
• List of fictional diaries
• Dork Diaries
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Official Dear Dumb Diary site from Scholastic.