A review by cassidylynnereads
Tales from a Not-So-Best Friend Forever by Rachel Renée Russell

1.0

It pains me so much to do this, but Dork Diaries #14 has officially earned my second ever one star rating. It has also officially driven me away from this series. It hurts so much to say that. I vividly remember the first time I was introduced to the Dork Diaries series. I was in middle school and the librarian showed a video, a book trailer for the Dork Diaries series. It looked like such an awesome book I had to read it right away! I was right, the books were spectacular and easily one of my favorite book series at the time. I loved the books so much that I continued reading them through high school. Finally, I ended up in college and my love for this series started to wane. I wondered if it was simply because I had grown up and moved on to books more appropriate for my age range, but I still adore the middle grade Warriors and Survivors series from my childhood. Despite the decreasing quality of the Dork Diaries books, I clung to the nostalgia they stirred up in me and found that there were a few books worth sticking around for. I was so excited to read this entry in the series that I had it on my Christmas list, then when I didn’t get it as a gift I bought the book myself. I rushed through the most recent book I was reading because I wanted so badly to fall back into the cutesy world of Nikki Maxwell. I was sorely disappointed. This book seemed to have no cohesive plot at all. It was obvious that the focus of the book would be on the Bad Boyz tour, so I was confused as to why there were nearly eighty pages of what seemed like filler before Nikki’s band even began to practice for the tour. I know there was the whole drama of missing the phone call with Trevor, but that felt like such an artificial conflict that was cooked up to make the page count higher. Then the tour was under way and because Nikki can never get into any kind of trouble without the narcissistic (potentially sociopathic) MacKenzie Hollister being the source of every one of her problems, MacKenzie was clumsily shoehorned into the story. As usual, she lords her wealth and influence over Nikki, but this time none of her threats actually seem to matter. Yes, Nikki does freak out at first (she freaks out over everything in this book instead of going with the obvious solution, which she should have learned to stop doing 14 books into the series), but nothing ever comes of MacKenzie’s threats. The Boyz are hardly even characters themselves, and the quizzes about them seem to be both filler (again, to up the page count) and redundant ways of reinforcing that these Boyz do, in fact, have personalities even though they appear for only about five minutes worth of book content. The “conflict” that only seemed to exist to beat the dead horse of proving that MacKenzie is such a totally evil monster was resolved in one poorly written sequence of tell-not-show descriptions. Also can I stop for a moment and talk about how stereotypical and harmful MacKenzie’s character is? Sure, she was meant to represent the typical mean girl, but in the past few books it seems more like her only purpose is to show readers how horrible it is to pretty and like makeup and be popular. Because only the dorks have good personalities and the popular people are always evil yet somehow have the whole school worshipping them (although at this point Nikki has way more friends than MacKenzie and is arguably much more popular than her). Picking at MacKenzie for her vanity seems mean spirited at this point. Where was the depth we saw in her for all of two books? It made her character so much better.

This ended up being a much longer ramble than I thought it would be considering it’s 3 am. I guess that just goes to show how bitter of a taste this book left in my mouth. I had such high hopes for it and I wanted to hold onto the Dork Diaries series until its end. But at this point there seems to be no end in sight even though the people who work on the books have clearly run out of ideas. So I will be taking my leave from Nikki Maxwell. It truly saddens me to let go of one of my most beloved childhood series.