Children's booksChildren's books This article is more than 9 years oldWhat can I read now I've finished Diary of a Wimpy Kid?
This article is more than 9 years oldThe Book Doctor suggests the next step for a Wimpy Kid fan on the hunt for something to read next. From Liz Pichon to Cressida Cowell, plenty of books help readers enter a whole new world and illustrations are great for hooking readers in
My son has read all of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid titles and has loved them. But now he wants to find something else. What should he read next?
Your son is far from alone in loving Wimpy Kid. Jeff Kinney’s titles shot to the top of the bestseller lists with Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the first title in the series, in 2008. And with every new book, from The Last Straw in 2009 to book 9, The Long Haul, which was published in 2014, the pattern has been repeated.
One of the attractions of the Wimpy Kid titles is the balance between words and pictures. Hooking readers into books is essential and illustrations work as a great lure for all those who have grown up with the best picture books. Whatever their reading ability all children can understand pictures and being able to do so gives them the confidence to tackle the words – especially when they are in short sections, as with the Wimpy Kid’s diary entries.
If your son has read the books in a short time rather than growing up with them and so growing out of them, Liz Pinchon’s Tom Gates titles, starting with The Brilliant World of Tom Gates, make an excellent follow up. Tom Gates has much in common with Greg Heffley and his unchecked love of doodles makes the books look very homely and inviting. With much the same tone but more words and a good back-story about running a detective agency is Stephan Pastis’ Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made and its sequels, in which the unfortunately named hero shares something of Greg Huffley’s accident-prone approach to life and many of his worries.
In Anthony Horowitz’s school-set Groosham Grange and its sequel Return to Groosham Grange, David Eliot has worries of quite a different kind. Sent there out of desperation by his parents, from the moment David discovers that that the new pupils have to sign their names in blood it soon becomes clear that this ghastly boarding school is not a good place to be, a view that is confirmed when pupils start to vanish at night…
For readers who want another story with both words and pictures, Cressida Cowell’s How to Train your Dragon and its many sequels about the zany and rollicking adventures of young Hiccup and his friends and their attempts to train their pet dragons is perfect. And Hiccup, the semi-hero of many of the titles, has some wimpy characteristics that Greg Heffley would surely recognise. Dragons also feature in a more straightforward and fast-paced adventure – without illustrations this time – as Charlie, hero of Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart Trilogy, gets his support from the wonderful and various good and bad stone dragons perched around London, which come alive after he accidentally snaps off the head of one outside the Natural History Museum.
The Baudelaire children from Lemony Snicket’s bestselling A Series Of Unfortunate Events first appear in The Bad Beginning. Their adversities are very different from those faced by Greg Heffley but their adventures – and there are 13 volumes of them in total – show equally resilient children. Like Jeff Kinney, Lemony Snicket, Cressida Cowell and many others (including Robert Muchamore with his Cherub series, which would also be a next step for Wimpy Kid fans) have written long series which enable readers to enter a whole new world and remain happily in it for a very long time!
Do you have a question for the Book Doctor? Email childrens.books@theguardian.com or pose it on Twitter @GdnchildrensBks, using #BookDoctor. If you are under 18 and not a member of the Guardian children’s books site join here, we’re packed full of book recommendations and ideas.
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