Russell said that she saw Nikki as an “Everygirl, all hues mixed together,” and that the struggle to fit in during middle school was universal. Zimmer worries that there is a perception that books with minority characters don’t sell well, which discourages writers from taking on diverse viewpoints.īut Ms. While First Book is eager to promote either authors or main characters from a diverse range of cultures, Ms. “When some people are talking about diversity, they want a protagonist and themes from a variety of cultural backgrounds,” Ms. Kyle Zimmer, the founder of First Book, a nonprofit organization that advocates more diversity in children’s books, said the “Dork Diaries” did not quite fit the bill. Still, her decision has made her something of a conundrum to those in the book world who want to promote multicultural writers and stories with themes particular to those groups. “If you have a character of a different race, your book tends to get put in a category that isn’t mainstream, and we wanted something to appeal to everyone,” Ms. She said she was following the lead of the screenwriter Shonda Rhimes, who created “Grey’s Anatomy” and its spinoff, “Private Practice,” and who has said that black writers should not be typecast into having only black characters.Īlso, there was the economics of the situation. Russell, an African-American, has also chosen to make Nikki white. Russell insists that she is able to build a character that young readers relate to because for many years she too was a dork. Each volume chronicles one month of the major crises in Nikki’s eighth-grade life, like a lack of invitations to cool parties, her crush on Brandon and her tangles with the school snob MacKenzie Hollister - or as Nikki calls her, that “KILLER SHARK” in “sparkly nail polish.” Nikki lays it all out with humor, lots of embedded illustrations and plenty of CAPITALIZATION and exclamation points!!!!!Ĭhanneling Nikki is the job of her creator, Rachel Renée Russell, a 53-year-old divorced former bankruptcy lawyer. The “Dork Diaries” are the journals of the socially aspiring, fashion-impaired Westchester Country Day School student Nikki Maxwell.
Dork diarie series#
If you are one of those people whose lives do not include a girl under the age of 12 - and in that case, OMG I am SO SORRY for you!!! - then the “Dork Diaries,” a series for tweens that has sold over 10 million copies in less than four years, may have escaped your notice.
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