History Literature / DearDumbDiary

* CoolAunt: Jamie enjoys the company of her Aunt Carol, who she sees as much cooler than her mom, Carol's sister.

* MiddleSchoolIsMiserable: The series portrays middle school problems in a humorous way that is written in a diary format from the mind of seventh-grader Jamie Kelly.

* MonsterClown: A fear of Jamie's, not helped by her bad experiences with real clowns. She regards all of them as soulless demons, and they're frequently mentioned as objects of horror.

* TheUnsmile: When Jamie is really happy in science class, she briefly smiles at Mike Pinsetti. He tries to smile back, but it looks "more like he has his hand caught in a car door". The illustration shows his face contorting painfully and his eyeballs moving out of place, complete with the [[UnsoundEffect Unsound Effects]] "strain" and "throb".

* WhamShot: Year Two, Book 6 opens with Jamie's usual "Dear Whoever Is Reading My Diary..." letter, then leads into several blank entries. The first real one immediately lets the reader know that this book will be getting into [[VerySpecialEpisode much more serious territory than the others]]:

-->[[WhamLine Grandma died]]."

* SecretTestOfCharacter: In ''Never Do Anything, Ever'', the gym class is separated into groups and presented with a situation in which they have to get a baby doll from one end of the gym to the other using a bunch of NoodleImplements, while pretending the floor of said gym is a river infested with crocodiles. The solution is [[spoiler:for one person to sacrifice themselves to the crocodiles, distracting them long enough for the rest of their group to carry everybody's babies across the gym floor to safety]].

* DiscreetDiningDisposal: Jamie h8des and dumps food in paper napkins when she doesn't feel like eating her mom's LethalChef-grade cooking.

** Angeline has much stronger [[AlphaBitch alpha bitch]] traits here than in most of the other books, and she is made out to be artificially pretty rather than naturally beautiful, although these aspects can also be attributed to Jamie's evolving perceptions of her.

* TrappedAtTheDinnerTable: At Jamie's school, Thursday is always Meat Loaf Day in the cafeteria. The meatloaf is so disgusting that nobody ever wants it, but Miss Bruntford, the cafeteria monitor, is always scolding the students for not eating it. One time, she gets so fed up that she announces that nobody's allowed to leave the cafeteria until they've finished the meatloaf. Somebody throws a hunk of meatloaf at her, and she furiously starts demanding to know who did it. Since Jamie is trying to get into the principal's office to steal Angeline's permanent record, she claims to have done it.

** Also, any dog in Angeline's care will rapidly become immaculate. [[JustifiedTrope Reasonable given the incredible amount of work the girl's put into studying all forms of hair care and treatment]].

* HadToBeSharp: Isabella had to become a master liar and manipulator in order to survive growing up in a house with her mean, bullying older brothers.

* BaitAndSwitchComparison: Jamie does these frequently across the series.

* BitchInSheepsClothing: Angeline's portrayal at the beginning is like this, before it's revealed that she has HiddenDepths and Jamie realizes that she's not a bad person after all, and that she never was one to begin with.

* ContinuityNod: In the second Year Two book, Isabella is mentioned using [=ChocoMint=] [=LipSmacker=]. This was the crux of her subplot way back in the first Year One book, where "her" flavor of lipstick was [=ChocoMint=], but she felt like she needed to find a new signature once Angeline started using it.
* ContrivedClumsiness: In ''Never Underestimate Your Dumbness'', to get herself, Jamie and Angeline out of having to wear painful wooden clogs at Aunt Carol's wedding, Isabella trips down the stairs while wearing them and then starts to scream and cry in pain, while Angeline "confirms" that it was the clogs that made her fall. Jamie doesn't even know it was faked until she hears Isabella laughing maniacally ten minutes later.
* CoolAunt[=/=]CoolBigSis: Carol is Jamie's cool aunt, but, seeing as Jamie is an only child, and Carol is younger than Jamie's mom and doesn't have any kids of her own yet, she fills the CoolBigSis role too.

* {{Crunchtastic}}: In addition to the word "vegetarian", Jamie crams the exuberant suffix "-tastical-abulous" into the names of her, Isabella, and Angeline's summer enterprises.
* DeconstructiveParody[=/=]DeconstructorFleet: Of fiction taking place in middle school. Everything is written by Benton in a tongue-in-cheek manner that winks to older readers, rather than the sincerity of many similar series.
* DiscreetDiningDisposal: Jamie does this with napkins when she doesn't feel like eating her mom's LethalChef-grade cooking.

** Angeline has much stronger [[AlphaBitch alpha bitch]] traits here than in most of the other books, and she is made out to be artificially pretty rather than naturally beautiful, although this can also be attributed to Jamie's evolving perceptions of her.

* EmbarrassingAdGig: In "The Worst Things in Life are Also Free", Isabella advertises her "beauty lemonade" using Jamie and Angeline's photos. Jamie serves as the ugly "before" picture, which naturally upsets her.
* EmbarrassingNickname: Mike Pinsetti is known to give these out. One particular example is "Butt Buttlington", who's been referred to as "Butt Buttlington" for so long that nobody even knows what his original name was. It apparently got so bad that even his ''mother'' referred to him as "Butt". Eventually Mike Pinsetti [[LaserGuidedKarma gets his own horrible nickname]] when Angeline calls him "Pin-Heady".

* EpicFail: In one book, Jamie, Isabella, Mike Pinsetti and TUKWNIF[[note]]"that ugly kid whose name I forget"[[/note]] are put into a group in gym where they are given an assignment to get a plastic baby across the gym using a rubber snake, a shoe, and a pot without it or them touching the floor (throwing it isn't allowed). Their plan is to use the snake as a catapult to launch the baby across the gym. Sounds good, right? Wrong, oh so horribly wrong. Isabella's aim is thrown off due to wearing contacts she put marker on, and she launches it in the wrong direction. Pinsetti, who is supposed to catch the baby from across the other end of the gym, ducks on instinct ("a month of head injuries had him spooked") and the baby sails through the window, falls onto the asphalt, and [[CrossesTheLineTwice gets run over by a school bus]].

** In the baby assignment above, Isabella wants to use the rubber snake they've been given to launch the baby instead, because they're not throwing it by hand. Angeline, for her group, cheats the assignment within minutes by pretending the doll is defective and asking the teacher to deliver it to Hudson on the other side of the room to see if he agrees. By doing so, she just got the baby across the gym within the rules without the teacher knowing it was the trial, and he's forced to accept it as their run.
** In book 7, Hudson invites Jamie and Angeline to have tacos after the school dance, saying "not Isabella. She can't come." Jamie and Angeline interpret this as Hudson deliberately excluding her, saying she wasn't ''allowed'' to come, and decide not to go because of this. In fact, Isabella had already been asked and told him she was ''unable'' to come, explaining this because she didn't know why her friends passed up the chance.

* FunnyForeigner: Subverted with Fléurrål in book 9. She's very Scandinavian and sticks out like a sore thumb in Mackerel Middle School, but Jamie admits she lacks the cultural context to know if she's normal or weird, so she withholds judgment.

* GlobalIgnorance: "Wheretheheckistan," Jamie's catch-all term for any foreign country she is unfamiliar with. She also thinks areas within miles of her city are foreign enough to have completely different cultures.
* {{Goth}}: Nadia, one of the people in the "friend auditions" in book 9.
* GrossoutShow: Though slightly less so as the series went on.

* HairOfGoldHeartOfGold: Angeline has beautiful blonde hair and is one of the nicest people around... it just takes Jamie a very long time to realize this.
* HeartbreakAndIceCream: Jamie lists this as something she does after bad fights with Isabella, before subverting it by admitting that she eats ice cream like a hog all the time.

* HeroicComedicSociopath: Isabella, in ''spades''. For all intents and purposes, she's frequently the ''antagonist'' of the books, despite also being a genuine best friend.

** In much quieter (but equally effective) fashion, Assistant Principal Devon and [[spoiler: his niece]] Angeline have their moments.
* MeaningfulEcho: The line "The first rule of the road is that beautiful things take time, and you can't rush glue" in ''Never Underestimate Your Dumbness.''

* MistakenForSuperpowered: In "Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers", Jamie is bitten by a baby boy. She and Isabella become convinced that her being bitten gave her superpowers that turned her mind into a boy's, tapping her into the way males think and giving her insight to their behavior. Near the end, she finds out she doesn't have powers when she realizes she failed to notice that Hudson was trying to flirt with her.

* MundaneMadeAwesome: The series practically ''runs'' on this, with the things that are vital social issues to the characters looking ridiculous to an older audience. This is, of course, entirely the point.

* NotTheIntendedUse: The cafeteria meatloaf tastes horrible, but strangely enough, it makes an amazing lip balm and can heal the most severely chapped lips in less than a day.

* PstandardPsychicPstance: Jamie assumes a couple of them to test her newfound superpowers and see what her crush is thinking ([[ItMakesSenseInContext long story]]). All it does is get him concerned about her health.

->''Now, by the power vested in me, I do promise that everything in this diary is true, or at least [[UnreliableNarrator as true as I think it needs to be]].''

* WoundedGazelleGambit: Isabella regularly pulls those to get her mean older brothers in trouble. She can punch herself a bruise in the middle of her own back, use ketchup to simulate a cut lip, and cry CrocodileTears that are more effective than most people's real tears.

* ContrivedClumsiness: In ''Never Underestimate Your Dumbness'', to get herself, Jamie and Angeline out of wearing painful wooden clogs at Aunt Carol's wedding, Isabella trips down the stairs while wearing them and then starts to scream and cry in pain, while Angeline "confirms" that it was the clogs that made her fall. Jamie doesn't even know it was faked until she hears Isabella laughing maniacally ten minutes later.

* BreadEggsBreadedEggs: This line from ''Can Adults Become Human?''
-->My social studies teacher never smiles. I know that's hard to believe, because everybody smiles about something, right? Isabella smiles when her brothers get in trouble. Angeline smiles when she thinks about how much prettier she is than a waterfall or a unicorn. I smile when I think about a unicorn kicking Angeline over a waterfall.

In summary, the books capture Jamie's thoughts through a mixture of {{plan}}s, strange events, humour just sailing on RuleOfFunny, and frequent {{deconstruction}}s and [[AffectionateParody parodies]] of common SchoolTropes. The main characters -- Jamie alongside [[HeroicComedicSociopath Isabella]] and [[ParodySue Angeline]] -- spend their seventh grade year getting into [[PlayedForLaughs wacky situations]], whether they revolve around (supposedly) haunted pants, creepy student-teacher crushes, money-raising schemes or teacher's relationships, often at the hands of a plot built by Isabella. Each book usually ends with Jamie learning a valuable lesson [[SubvertedTrope (though it may not be the one you'd expect)]].

--->My social studies teacher never smiles. I know that's hard to believe, because everybody smiles about something, right? Isabella smiles when her brothers get in trouble. Angeline smiles when she thinks about how much prettier she is than a waterfall or a unicorn. I smile when I think about a unicorn kicking Angeline over a waterfall.

In summary, the books capture Jamie's thoughts through a mixture of {{plan}}s, strange events, humour just sailing on RuleOfFunny, and frequent {{deconstruction}}s and [[AffectionateParody parodies]] of common SchoolTropes. The main characters -- Jamie alongside [[HeroicComedicSociopath Isabella]] and [[ParodySue Angeline]] -- spend their seventh grade year getting into [[HilarityEnsues wacky situations]], whether they revolve around (supposedly) haunted pants, creepy student-teacher crushes, money-raising schemes or teacher's relationships, often at the hands of a plot built by Isabella. Each book usually ends with Jamie learning a valuable lesson [[SubvertedTrope (though it may not be the one you'd expect)]].

%% * GettingCrapPastThe Radar: Due to overwhelming and persistent misuse, GCPTR is on-page examples only until 01 June 2021. If you are reading this in the future, please check the trope page to make sure your example fits the current definition.