Literature / Dear Dumb Diary

Dear Troper Who Is Reading My Dumb Diary,

Are you sure you're supposed to be reading somebody else's diary? Maybe I told you that you could, so that's okay. But if you are Angeline, I did NOT give you permission, so stop it.

If you are my parents, then YES, I know that I am not allowed to call people idiots and fools and goons and halfwits and pinheads and all that, but this is a diary, and I didn't actually "call" them anything. I wrote it. And if you punish me for it, then I will know that you read my diary, which I am not giving you permission to do.

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

Signed,
Jamie Kelly

Dear Dumb Diary is a series of children's books written by Jim Benton (who also created It's Happy Bunny and Franny K. Stein), presented as the diaries of Jamie Kelly, a middle-school girl with a very interesting view of the world.

In summary, the books capture Jamie's thoughts through a mixture of plans, strange events, humour just sailing on Rule of Funny, and frequent deconstructions and parodies of common School Tropes. Jamie, her best friend Isabella, and her frenemy Angeline spend their seventh grade year getting into 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 (though it may not be the one you'd expect).

As of the tenth book, Jamie has finished her six years of the seventh grade.

In 2013, there was a musical film adaptation of the series made for TV, premiering on Hallmark Channel and subsequently available briefly on streaming services like Netflix. Co-written by Benton, the film's plot adopts elements from various books in the series.

For other children's book series in a diary format, see Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Dork Diaries.

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List of books in the series

Year One

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

Year Two

1. School. Hasn't This Gone On Long Enough?
2. The Super-Nice Are Super-Annoying
3. Nobody's Perfect. I'm As Close As It Gets
4. What I Don't Know Might Hurt Me
5. You Can Bet on That
6. Live Each Day to the Dumbest
7. Dumbness Is A Dish Best Served Cold

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This series provides examples of:

• The Ace: Angeline is popular, beautiful, smart, and multi-talented and could have anything she ever wanted...but the way people perceive her as perfect bothers her and she expresses a desire to be seen as a normal human. She's overjoyed when more substantially recognized as a "best friend" in school voting rather than being voted prettiest, and she grows resentful of her peers using her as a paradigm in a project about etiquette.
• All-Natural Snake Oil: Subverted in that Jamie's not trying to scam people, but in The Worst Things in Life Are Also Free, she slaps the adjective "vegetarian" (something she's entertaining being) on all of her friends' enterprises to make them sound more virtuous and appealing...even though vegetarianism has absolutely nothing to do with their services.
• Alpha Bitch: Angeline... according to Jamie, anyway. Yes, she's ridiculously beautiful and has tremendous influence...but she has no clique, hangers-on, or regular friends (until you can count Jamie), is friendly to all the school "losers", shows no concern over her social status, and while an excellent manipulator, uses said power rarely and when she does, it's generally for good.
• Animal Motifs: Jamie compares her classmate Margaret to a beaver, due to her obsession with chewing pencils.
• Baffled by Own Biology: In "Never Underestimate Your Dumbness", Jamie wonders if she's getting a zit on her chin, but it turns out to be a bruise from falling down the stairs.
• Bait-and-Switch Comparison: Jamie frequently invokes this, using an extreme and a real option before revealing she was referring to something real with the extreme description.
• Beautiful All Along: Parodied on two separate occasions. The first time, Jamie and Isabella give a makeover to an unpopular girl named Margaret and as a result, end up becoming Unwitting Pawns in another girl's plan. The second time, it turns out that the only reason Jamie isn't considered pretty is her unflattering hair.
• Big Brother Bully: Isabella's older brothers are so mean that she had to become a borderline sociopath herself just to survive growing up in the same house with them.
• Bilingual Bonus: Jim Benton's name is written in Japanese on page 32 of the sixth book.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Angeline's portrayal at the beginning of the series is of a devious person and insidious rival hidden under the popular girl. As the series evolved and Angeline shifted toward being a genuinely wonderful person, this element of her personality was retained under the lens of her being an excellent social manipulator who could cause some real damage if she was a truly selfish person, while contrasting her against Isabella, who is truly selfish but not usually as good at executing a plot as Amgeline is.
• Brain Bleach: Jamie's walked in on her naked grandma and claims her eyeballs were fried from the horror.
• Brainy Brunette: Isabella, but less in the sense of academics and more in the way of evil genius. Jamie expresses surprise whenever Isabella seems to be interested in academic work, but Isabella is running a scheme in almost every book.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • Can Adults Become Human? contains the paragraph "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 Never Underestimate Your Dumbness, Jamie comments that if she was a dog and had to choose between the pound and Angeline, she would choose the pound, unless the third choice was to pound Angeline.
• Call-Back: When Angeline finally fixes Jamie's hair in book 8, the last time it was offered (which was in book 3) is mentioned.
• Characterization Marches On: In the first few books, Angeline was more like a stereotypical popular girl, and Isabella was spacey and awkward instead of cunning and manipulative.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: The peaches Jamie's mom packed in her lunch in book 1. First, a peach rolls out of Jamie's bag, earning Jamie the nickname "Peach Girl" from Mike Pinsetti, and then another peach rolls out at the end of the book, but Angeline interrupts Pinsetti by giving him a nickname of his own. Then, nine books later, Jamie finds the old rotten peach in her locker, and Isabella takes it, later making it up to look like a shrunken head, trying to sell it to fund the amusement-park trip being offered by Jamie's aunt, but getting in trouble with the police because she tried to sell it to a cop's son.
• Chekhov's Gun: Being surprisingly tightly plotted is one of the strong points of the series. It's a good bet that everything is one, and trying to figure out just how some offhand comment or minor event is going to recur and become a plot element is a good part of the appeal to adults.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Jamie.
• Comically Missing the Point: Very frequently with both Jamie and Isabella, and Jamie's constant misconceptions about what's going on are what allow the books to have a longer plot.
• Continuity Nod: 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 chapstick was ChocoMint, but she felt like she needed to find a new signature once Angeline started using it.
• Contrived Clumsiness: 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, corroborating the ruse. Jamie doesn't even know it was faked until she hears Isabella laughing maniacally ten minutes later.
• Cool Aunt: Jamie enjoys the company of her Aunt Carol, who she sees as much cooler than her mom, Carol's sister. Carol often makes jokes that put off Jamie's mom and often tries to act more like one of Jamie's peers.
• Couch Gag: Each book starts with a slightly different notice from Jamie to the reader about not reading her diary, and a different postscript about the consequences of doing so.
• Countrystan: Jamie often uses the phrase "Wheretheheckistan" to refer to hypothetical far away places. The first usage is when her mother suggests children in poor countries would be grateful to eat her cooking, and Jamie snarks, "It seems to me the kids in Wheretheheckistan have enough problems without dumping Mom's casserole on them, too."
• Crocodile Tears: According to Jamie, Isabella's pretend crying is more effective than most people's real crying.
• Cross-Popping Veins: Jamie's English teacher Mr. Evans has a giant blue vein on his forehead that throbs when he's angry (which is often).
• Crunchtastic: In addition to the word "vegetarian", Jamie crams the invented exuberant suffix "-tastical-abulous" into the names of her, Isabella, and Angeline's summer enterprises.
• Deconstructive Parody/Deconstructor Fleet: Of fiction taking place in middle school. The story takes on tones of absurdity and satire that poke fun at the social drama of middle schools and the kinds of stories focused on it.
• Discreet Dining Disposal: Jamie hides and dumps food in paper napkins when she doesn't feel like eating her mom's Lethal Chef-grade cooking.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The early books are a bit different from the later ones, mainly in terms of the art and the characterizations.
  • Isabella is less of the schemer she is in later books, with her first full-on scam only appearing in the fourth book. She is also more frequently drawn with translucent glasses, while later books draw her glasses as opaque by default.
  • Angeline has much stronger 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. She's also implied to have a dark past and a wicked streak, aspects which stopped being alluded to later on, where she instead became a noble manipulator with a selfish exception (working to get Hudson at all costs).
  • An unnamed principal who doesn't appear in the later books appears as the school's authority figure instead of Assistant Principal Devon, who is absent in the first book.
  • Stinker is not yet the Gasshole he is in later books.
• Embarrassing Ad Gig: In "The Worst Things in Life are Also Free", Isabella advertises her "beauty lemonade" scam using Jamie and Angeline's photos. Jamie serves as the ugly "before" picture, which naturally upsets her.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Mike Pinsetti is known to give these out. One victim Jamie cites 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 gets his own horrible nickname when Angeline calls him "Pin-Heady".
• Endearingly Dorky: Discussed in "School. Hasn't This Gone on Long Enough?" when Angeline puts on a pair of glasses to read poetry. Jamie feels that since Angeline is beautiful, she's not allowed to be dorky, as that attribute belongs to people who aren't beautiful.
• Epic Fail: In one book, Jamie, Isabella, Mike Pinsetti and TUKWNIF^note "that ugly kid whose name I forget" are put into a group in gym where they must 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 gets run over by a school bus.
• Evil Laugh: Isabella does one after after successfully getting Aunt Carol to change the wedding clogs to regular shoes by "accidentally" falling down the stairs in them.
  Jamie: When Isabella laughs like that, often something very bad is about to happen to you. I always look behind me to make sure I'm not about to back into an airplane propeller or something like that.
• Exact Words:
  • 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 (intended to be long-term) 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, leaving Angeline's group free to chill out for the rest of the unit.
  • 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 in solidarity with Isabella. In fact, Isabella had already been asked by Hudson and told him she was unable to come, explaining this because she didn't know why her friends passed up the exciting opportunity.
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: Angeline's mere presence drives Jamie nuts just because she's so unbelievably beautiful and perfect. One illustration has five identical drawings of Angeline smiling, with individual captions under each one reading "Angeline making me mad", "Angeline making me enraged", "Angeline making me mental", "Angeline making me bananas", and "Angeline making me have rabies".
• Foul Cafeteria Food: The school meatloaf is derided as some of the most disgusting food out there, but the lunch monitor Miss Bruntford always makes the kids eat it anyway. However, when she tries it herself in "Am I the Princess or the Frog?," she gets sick and shouts for the kids to call 911, putting her out of commission for a while.
• Freudian Excuse: Isabella's Manipulative Bastard tendencies and trust issues come from living with her mean older brothers. When doing a trust fall exercise in gym, Jamie comments, "Isabella could no more summon the trust to fall backward into somebody's arms than she could fall backward into a wood chipper."
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Jamie's mother uses this on her when scolding her for her poor math grade. Jamie despises it and describes it as feeling it burned into her ear.
• Funny Foreigner: Subverted with Fléurrål in book 9. She's comically Scandinavian and sticks out like a sore thumb in Mackerel Middle School, but Jamie steps back to admit she lacks the cultural context to know if Fléurrål is normal or weird, so she withholds judgment.
• Gender-Blender Name: "Jamie" is a unisex name, used for the female protagonist.
• Global Ignorance: "Wheretheheckistan" is Jamie's catch-all term for any foreign country she is unfamiliar with, showing a broad lack of interest or knowledge in other countries. She also thinks areas within a few miles of her city are foreign enough to have exotically different cultures.
• Goth: Nadia, one of the candidates in the "friend auditions" in book 9 is a goth girl whose game is so strong even the food she eats for lunch is black.
• Grotesque Cute: Jamie's drawings sometimes fall into this.
• Had to Be Sharp: Isabella had to become Ax-Crazy, a master liar, and and a skilled manipulator in order to survive growing up in a house with her mean, bullying older brothers.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Angeline has beautiful blonde hair and is one of the nicest people around... it just takes Jamie a very long time to realize that Angeline is actually a straightforward example of this archetype.
• Heartbreak and Ice Cream: Jamie lists eating ice cream like a hog 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.
• Helpless with Laughter: In "Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers", Jamie throws bouncy balls at the window while Stinkette watches excitedly. Isabella is laughing so hard at Stinkette's reaction that she has to write "Please stop can't breathe" in the dirt with her finger.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Isabella, in spades. She's never really emotionally supportive and is often running a scheme for selfish gains across the various books. For all intents and purposes, she's frequently the antagonist of the books, despite also being Jamie's genuine best friend.
• Hidden Depths: A theme of the series is that everyone has them, with Jamie coming to see almost every character she doesn't understand or like as more three-dimensional human beings.
• High Koala-ty Cuteness: Jamie absolutely loves koalas because they're so cute. It's a Running Gag throughout the series that she'll find a way to bring up koalas in practically any situation, especially when trying to aesthetically improve a situation or set some kind of standard for cuteness.
• Holding in Laughter: The book My Pants are Haunted! begins with Jamie and her mother arguing over fashion trends at her school.
  Jamie's narration: I told her that I think she can't possibly know how important trends can be, and she said that clothes were just as important when she was in middle school. Then I said that I understood how she probably always tried her best to make a good impression on Fred and Wilma and Barney and the whole gang down at the tar pit, but times had changed.
  Mom: Just how do you think that makes me feel?
  Jamie: Stupid?
  Jamie's narration: Turns out that Mom had a different answer in mind, and I'll have a little time to figure out what it was since I'm here in my bedroom about five hours earlier than usual. I also think that Dad sitting there trying not to laugh might have made things worse.
  (illustration of Dad covering his mouth and trying not to laugh while soup is spewing out his ears)
• Hurricane of Puns: In Am I the Princess or the Frog?, Jamie learns that when Angeline was little, her hair looked horrible because her mom didn't know how to style it, and everyone would laugh at her, so she had to learn how to do it herself. She has an Imagine Spot of little Angeline looking up how to style hair, surrounded by books with titles like "Curl Up and Dye", "To Bleach His Own", "Hair We Go Again", and "Grin and Barrette".
• Implausible Deniability: The second book begins with a note from Jamie to Isabella telling her not to read the diary. The very next page has a note from Isabella that says, "Dear Jamie, I do NOT read your diary, so get over yourself. P.S. I totally agree with the stuff you said about your mom."
• Informed Attractiveness: Due to the comic-like style of the drawings, we have to take Jamie's word on it when people are described as significantly more attractive.
  • Angeline, good gods, Angeline. Jamie just can not stop talking about how pretty she is.
  • Colette, a brunette whom Jamie describes as even prettier than Angeline.
  • Ms. Anderson, the most attractive female teacher.
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • Jamie's thought processes sometimes follow this pattern. Example: She sees Angeline with two younger girls who don't look like her. Obviously, they must be siblings, but they don't look like Angeline, which means Angeline's father did plastic surgery on her, which means Angeline is rich. And when the younger girls change week by week, they're clearly not different children, but the same ones plastic-surgeried back and forth by the rich dad!
  • Isabella too, like when she rationalizes Jamie's will to kick her in the face as a result of a radioactive baby-bite that's turning her mind into a boy's and that's why she also understands the way they think.
• Irrational Hatred: Jamie spends a few dozen pages per book raging against Angeline for being too perfect and pretty all the time.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jamie and (possibly) Isabella.
• Kids Are Cruel: Or at least very shallow. The characters are in middle school where reputation is everything and can be destroyed over the smallest things.
• Lethal Chef: Jamie's mother (except when she's making hors d'œuvres). The meat loaf she makes is even worse than the school's meat loaf that students complain about on weekly basis.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Invoked by the title of the first book, and later in book 3 when Jamie mentions a time she accidentally walked in on her mom trying and failing to put on a miniskirt from her glory days. She says her mom gave her permission to throw apples at passing cars, with the implicit understanding that Jamie is to "forget" about the incident. Jamie notes that her mom's judgment was really off on that one and didn't take her up on it, but she is willing to eat candy for breakfast when her mom tries to get her to stay out of the kitchen while she's cooking.
• Life-Affirming Aesop': Live Each Day to the Dumbest has Jamie fall into a state of ennui after her grandmother dies. After reading what she believes is her grandmother's diary and seeing entries about the same kind of middle school romance drama Jamie herself worries about, Jamie decides it's all just "dumb," since she knows her grandmother will eventually die and none of this will matter, and she loses passion for her usual interests like art or the school dance. However, when she learns this was her grandfather's diary and he was writing about the woman who would become his wife, Jamie realizes sometimes "dumb" things can be important too. She goes to the school dance with Hudson and has a good time, realizing you need to enjoy the "dumb" things in life to get to the "smart" things, "and maybe sometimes the dumbness is even the best part of your day. Or your week. Or your life."
• Limited Wardrobe: Unless they're stated to be dressed differently in the story, Jamie only draws people with one constant outfit.
• Lonely at the Top: Angeline is revered and adored as the most popular girl in school, but it's made clearer over time that she had no close friends until Jamie and Isabella—she's not named with any clique and nobody is defined as a particular friend of hers before Jamie and Isabella, and Angeline is notably thrilled to be recognized as a "Best Friend" with them in the school voting categories in book 6, likely not only because it's more substantial than "Prettiest" but also because she's never had (or been) a best friend before.
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • Isabella, almost to the point of parody. In the words of Jamie, "I'm pretty sure that if Isabella had been born a cute little antelope, all the cute little antelopes in Africa would be hunting and eating cheetahs by now. As well as elephants. And human beings."
  • In much quieter (but equally or more effective) fashion, Assistant Principal Devon and his niece Angeline have their moments.
• Meaningful Echo: The line "The first rule of the road is that beautiful things take time, and you can't rush glue" appears at the beginning and end of Never Underestimate Your Dumbness.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Angeline's name does double duty, connoting both physical perfection and moral goodness, both of which she exhibits throughout the series, to Jamie's disgust.
  • Emmily is a parody of this—her name has two "m"s because it reminds her of candy—no, not because of M&Ms like Jamie initially thought (Emmily thinks those are stamped with "w"s or "3"s) but because she says "mm" in enjoyment when she eats sweets.
• Men Can't Keep House: Jamie's father comes up with "creative" ways to avoid dirtying any dishes when his wife is away and does not know how to use a washing machine (or even what the machine to clean clothes is called) and jokes that if he hadn't met Jamie's mother he would be living in a very dirty cardboard box.
• Micro Dieting: A variation — while Jamie's mom is usually a horrible cook, she can make incredibly delicious appetizers, with her daughter commenting, "It's like she'd be a great cook if she only had to prepare meals for Barbies."
• Middle School Is Miserable: The series portrays middle school problems, such as bullying, Foul Cafeteria Food, confusing assignments, and unpleasant teachers, in a humorous way that is written in a diary format from the mind of seventh-grader Jamie Kelly.
• Mind Control: In two books, some way to control people's emotions and attitudes through scents is plot-significant, and seems to go a bit beyond Jamie's fertile imagination. A common early example of Jamie's imagination is her momentarily falling under Angeline's "evil spells".
• Mistaken for Superpowered: 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 didn't get powers when she realizes she failed to notice that Hudson was trying to flirt with her.
• Monster Clown: A fear of Jamie's, not helped by her bad experiences with real clowns. She regards all clowns as soulless demons, and they're frequently mentioned as objects of horror.
• Moving Beyond Bereavement: Live Each Day to the Dumbest focuses on Jamie coming to terms with her grandmother's death. She spends much of the book in a fog as she no longer cares about the "dumb" things she usually does (like going to the dance with Hudson), and worries likewise about her mother and aunt's feelings after losing their mother. She reads a diary from her grandmother's belongings, which only makes her feel worse as the problems seem so insignificant and she knows her grandmother won't live forever. She feels better after talking with Aunt Carol and learning that was her grandfather's diary, and he was writing about going to the dance with Jamie's grandmother in middle school, which turned out to be an important part of their lives. Jamie decides to embrace the "dumb" parts of her life instead of obsessing over what seems to actually matter. She also notes when her mother slowly begins to act like herself again.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Jamie's fear of clowns. One book implies it came from Jamie walking in on a clown changing while a later book says it's because Isabella dared Jamie to sleep all night near the gravestone of a clown that died. Of course, nothing says it couldn't be both.
• Mundane Made Awesome: The series practically runs on this, with the things that are vital social issues to the young characters looking ridiculous to an older audience. This is, of course, entirely the point.
• Mystery Meat: Apparently, this is all the school cafeteria serves on Thursdays. Even the cafeteria monitor who gets upset when it isn't eaten draws the line at students consuming multiple servings.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: As a second grader, Isabella beat the crap out of a boy for laughing at her last name. (It's "Vinchella", by the way.)
  It took three teachers and half the class to pull Isabella off Lewis, who she seemed to be playing like a fat little xylophone. (He actually made higher noises when she punched him in certain places.)
• No Full Name Given: Of the main trio of girls, Angeline is the only one whose last name we never learn. Likely deliberate given Jamie's initial distance from her and reluctant friendship later on.
• Not the Intended Use: 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. That the meat loaf is best as a lip balm is one of the most concerning aspects of the abominable school food.
• Not What It Looks Like: In "My Pants Are Haunted!", Jamie keeps finding perfectly circular holes in the seats of her pants and assumes her dog Stinker chewed them up. It turns out that her mom was using a special kind of bleach to try and fade them for Jamie so they'd be trendier, but the bleach was just eating through the fabric.
• Oral Fixation: Margaret has an obsession with chewing pencils that makes Jamie compare her to a beaver.
  Jamie: I don't want to say she's still eating a lot of pencils, but when she farts, I swear you can almost see a little puff of sawdust.
• Parody Sue: Angeline, though the sixth book shows that she could also be considered a Deconstructed Sue. The first couple of books may be one of the more complete subversions of the Canon Sue trope in literature. Jamie starts out obsessing about how Angeline is so obviously a Mary Sue (not by trope name) and how every little thing that happens is clearly all about Angeline. In fact, Angeline's only real relevance in the early plots is actually caused by this obsession. She only has the narrative spotlight because the protagonist is constantly throwing it at her.
• The Plan: Once per book.
• Pooled Funds: At one point in the second book, Jamie imagines Angeline taking a bath in pure money, complete with hot and cold running diamonds, jewel encrusted soap and a "rug of extraordinary fluffiness".
• Popular Is Dumb: Averted by Angeline, who is more level-headed and has a more mature, informed worldview compared to Isabella and Jamie.
• Pstandard Psychic Pstance: Jamie assumes a couple of psychic sensing poses to test her newfound superpowers and see what her crush is thinking (long story). All it does is get him concerned about her health.
• Punny Name: The school's gym teacher, Mr. Dover. Jamie makes a point to remind us every time he's mentioned that "His first name is Ben, if you can believe it"
• Remember the New Guy?: Lampshaded with the sudden prominence of Vicki Vonder in book 12, a key character who had never been seen or mentioned once before in the series. Jamie mocks asking her diary if it remembers Vicki, and says no, of course it doesn't, Jamie's never mentioned her...because, apparently, Vicki is so bland and uninteresting that nobody's ever mentioned her before.
• Rule of Funny: So many things, like the bizarre metaphor Jamie opens book 7 with.
• Running Gag:
  • The meat loaf which is the school's Thursday lunch, and is absolutely disgusting.
  • Wheretheheckistan, a conglomeration of nations that Jamie envisions when her mother complains about wasting her privilege, i.e., the place where the "starving children" are who could benefit from the food she doesn't want to eat.
  • Jamie's mother's horrible cooking.
  • Jamie's aggressively unspecial hair.
  • Angeline's apparent Sueness, which only Jamie sees, and the constant tirades about and jabs at Angeline's frustrating beauty.
  • Isabella's relationship with her unseen older brothers, who have hardened her to the junior mastermind she is.
  • Jamie references many incidents in her past that involve her walking in on people in various embarrassing situations.
  • Jamie's irrational fear of clowns, and adoration of koalas (often contrasted with each other).
• Secret Test of Character: 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 Noodle Implements, while pretending the floor of said gym is a river infested with hungry crocodiles. The solution is 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.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: Isabella knows how to deliberately achieve this with a light source, and in a downplayed example, her glasses are mostly drawn as opaque throughout the series.
• Serious Business: Middle-school petty drama is facetiously portrayed as the realm of highest importance through the eyes of the middle-schoolers who are living it.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: Jamie pretends not to acknowledge that Angeline is a good person, since she has long harbored grudges against her for being popular, but has learned that Angeline isn't putting on a facade—she's genuinely a lovely person who wants to be Jamie's friend.
• Shipper on Deck: In book 7, Isabella feigns a school project about the inventor of the leash so she can take Jamie's dog Stinker on walks and shove him under the fence to spend time with Angeline's dog Stickybuns. While she claims she saw love at first sight between the dogs, the bottom line was that Isabella wanted a puppy, and her plan succeeds, with a litter being born in the next book and Isabella getting one of the puppies.
• Shout-Out: In the first book, Jamie comments that Angeline, after getting a mildly Traumatic Haircut on one side, now only looks like the prettiest girl in the world if you're standing on her right, and then says, "Actually, I think she would look better if I was standing on her neck."
• Silly Brain Diagram:
  • Am I the Princess or the Frog? has a variation when Jamie talks about how Angeline has invented Zone Shampooing, which involves slathering different parts of your head with different types of shampoo. The illustration shows "My Theory of The Excellent Odors She Probably Has Loaded", with Angeline's hair separated into zones for "Raspberry," "Butterscotch," "Lemon-Lime," "Suntan Lotion," "Pizza," "Baby's Head," "Kiwi," "Salad," "Bubble Gum," and "Candy Store."
  • In The Problem With Here Is That It's Where I'm From, Jamie's aunt Carol is about to get married and thinking about nothing else but her upcoming wedding. Her brain is divided into "Romanticness of the Invitations," "Glamorousness of Wedding Dress," "Preciousness of the Bouquet," and "Fairytaleness of Wedding Cake," with a very tiny section dedicated to "Normal Things That Normal People Think About."
  • In It's Not My Fault I Know Everything, Jamie comments on Isabella's excellent memory and draws a diagram of her brain separated into three parts, "Where Mom Hides Candy," "Funny Words That Make Teachers Freak," and "All of the Things Jamie Has Asked Me To Just Forget."
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Angeline thinks of Jamie and Isabella as friends and either isn't aware of their scorn for her or just ignores it. It takes Jamie eight books to realize this.
• Stalker with a Crush:
  • Jamie, toward Hudson Rivers.
  • Eventually, Hudson to Isabella. This is even portrayed in the ninth book with several similes.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Jamie calls a kid at her school "T.U.K.W.N.I.F." for "That Ugly Kid Whose Name I Forget". When temporary-transfer student Colette reveals that she found out about the school from a student's mother she dubbed "T.U.L.W.N.I.F." for "That Ugly Lady Whose Name I Forgot", Jamie knows exactly which student she was the mother of from the nickname alone.
• Suddenly Always Knew That: Almost a Running Gag. At the end of a book where a skill is plot-relevant (speaking a foreign language, playing guitar in a band, maintaining an automobile), it tends to turn out that Angeline had said skill the whole time and didn't bother to mention it.
• Supreme Chef: According to Jamie, Isabella's mother's homemade meat loaf is so delicious, it's probably a cow's second wish to become said meat loaf. (The first wish, of course, is to stay alive as a cow.)
• Take That!: The Whisker Brothers, a three-boy band whose lyrics seems manufactured to make a middle school girl like them, and have their own TV show.
• Teacher/Student Romance: The Squick inherent in this tropes is lampshaded in the third book. Jamie thinks the new cafeteria monitor, Mr. Prince, is in love with her and starts to feel the same, but when Angeline hears about it, she disproves it and tells Jamie he would have to go to "Gross Guy Prison" if that were true.
• Terrible Interviewees Montage: In book 9, Jamie auditions for a new friend to pair off with Angeline so she can have Isabella back to herself. We see several strange applicants, though Jamie does give each consideration. Her conclusions are frequently illogical, however, something she later realizes.
• That Came Out Wrong: A non-innuendo variety occurs in book 5 when Jamie comes up with some unintentionally disturbing analogies, like "smooth as gravy through a grandma".
• The Film of the Book: The series received a musical film adaptation in 2013 that was released on the Hallmark Channel.
• Toilet Humour: Recurs. In particular, Jamie's dog Stinker is a magnet for this type of joke. As often as not, Stinker's bodily functions even drive the plot.
• Trapped at the Dinner Table: 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. It was actually Angeline, who's grateful to Jamie for taking the fall—she indicates there's some bad stuff on that very same permanent record and that another mark on it would have really messed up her life.
• Uncatty Resemblance:
  • Invoked when Isabella creates a class photo project exploring the phenomenon to embarrass Jamie, whose dog Stinker offers a very unflattering comparison. Isabella dodges this herself (she has a turtle) by getting rid of it and using an adorable kitten instead.
  • Also, any dog in Angeline's care will rapidly become gorgeous. Reasonable given the incredible amount of work the girl's put into studying all forms of hair care and treatment.
• Unreliable Narrator: Very, very heavily implied, to the point where it's the source of a lot of the comedy.
• The Unsmile:
  • 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 Unsound Effects "strain" and "throb".
  • In What I Don't Know Might Hurt Me, Jamie illustrates some of the vice principal's large, obviously unimpressed smiles that he uses when he has to sit through another school play or feign pride that a student bumped their grade up to a D-. The last smile is just as wide but obviously more sincere, and means, "Oh, is it Friday already? Interesting."
• Very Special Episode: Live Each Day to the Dumbest centers around the death of Jamie's grandmother and Jamie's grieving process. She spends a large portion of the book not caring about anything because her grandmother's death has made everything feel insignificant in comparison (especially when she reads what she believes is her grandmother's middle school diary and notices how similar it is to Jamie's own), only recovering when she realizes some of these seemingly insignificant events were significant after all. The book establishes the tone quickly when, after one typically funny diary entry, there's a week of completely blank pages because Jamie had no idea what to write for some time after her grandmother's death.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Jamie and Isabella are very much aware of this, while Angeline is less aware of Jamie's vitriol.
• Wham Shot: Year Two, Book 6 opens with Jamie's usual "Dear Whoever Is Reading My Diary..." letter and a typical silly diary entry about Jamie's ideas for household products, then leads into several blank entries. The next real one immediately lets the reader know that this book will be getting into much more serious territory than the others:
  "Dear Dumb diary,
  Grandma died."
• What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: Jamie is not afraid to admit this.
  THINGS THAT JAMIE DOES NOT CARE ABOUT: Endangered animals that are mean and gross
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: In book 6, Jamie wants to learn an accent to seem more interesting, and learns how to talk like Isabella's grandma, who Jamie thinks is Italian. She gets a lot of weirded-out reactions, but isn't aware of it until Isabella explains that her grandma is actually from nearby and talks funny due to broken dentures, and figured a speech impediment was close enough to an accent to teach Jamie.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Isabella has mastered the art in order to get revenge against her mean older brothers. She can punch herself a bruise in the middle of her own back, use ketchup to simulate a cut lip, and cry Crocodile Tears that are more effective than most people's real tears.
• X Must Not Win: In book 6, Angeline deliberately sabotages her own campaign to win "Prettiest" in school voting by leaving messages to vote for Jamie, knowing this would take votes away from temporary student Colette, whom Angeline, normally a lock for the vote, knew she stood no chance against. Because the students were more comfortable voting for someone from their school, the votes that could have given Colette the win were instead given to Jamie, leaving Angeline on top. She explains that even though it was a superficial thing to be recognized for, at least it was something she had claim to and wasn't about to give up. Jamie and Isabella work to arrange a new set of results to satisfy everyone, and Angeline is delighted to be a winner for "Best Friends".
• You Are the New Trend: In book 12, Jamie finds herself being copied by her peers, and is intensely annoyed by it, so she constantly shifts her public interests, and to less pleasant things, to try and throw her imitators off, though they just keep following her example. Turns out, it was engineered by Angeline as a gift. She thought Jamie would appreciate some time with social influence, and so copied Jamie. Because she's Angeline, a chain of copying ensued, with Vicki copying Angeline to be more popular, Emmily copying Vicki because she reminded her of a cartoon animal she liked, and Isabella copying Emmily because she wanted to be as happy as her.