Module 10: Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul

Book Summary: Greg and his family are on their way on a family road trip that his mother coordinated from her favorite magazine Family Frolic.  Greg knows it will be a disaster because everything she gets from the magazine turns out terribly bad.  Everything goes wrong from the start of the trip when his father decides he wants to take his boat which has a tree growing underneath it and piles of junk that has to be unloaded before they can get it out of the garage.  Once they have loaded up  the boat and car, Greg is stuck in the back and has no room to move or breathe.  They run into more problems from gum getting stuck in the sunroof, bad hotel room where Greg sleeps in the closet, and coming encounter with a tough and rough family that seems to be following them! When they lose their locker key at the water park and now mom and dad have no money or phones and their cars radiator is damaged because Rodney had an accident in it while driving.  They decide to go back home and end their trip, but not before Manny decides to go by and pick up the pig that he won at a fair that was not car or house broken.

Reference: Kinney, J. (2014). Diary of a wimpy kid:The long haul. New York, NY: Amulet.

Impression: I laughed out loud literally at this book and truly enjoyed its humor and flow.  It was a great example of a graphic novel with just the right amount of text and illustration.  Each picture went along with the text and the sentences were two to three lines in sets across the page.  You were able to turn the pages easily without getting distracted by the illustrations.  There was just the right amount of positive and negative space on each page to make this book your ideal graphic novel.

I can see why boys especially are drawn to these books because they can relate to the mischievousness and annoyance of Greg and Rodney.  You have two brothers who are different from each other and have the typical sibling rivalry.  The characters are believable along with the events that occur in the book as well. I would recommend this book to ages 8-13 because of the ease of reading the style that it is written in.

Professional Reviews:
From Publisher's Weekly
Could a Heffley family vacation ever be anything but a series of escalating tribulations that would test Job's resolve? In this ninth Diary of a Wimpy Kid outing, Kinney detours from the more episodic nature of the earlier books to trace the family's doomed-from-the-start road trip, spurred by Greg's mother's subscription to Family Frolic ("There must be something wrong with our family," Greg muses, "because we can never measure up to the ones in the magazine"). Kinney maintains his knack for getting the details of family life just right (naturally, the only available lounge chair at a wildly overcrowded waterpark is the one with several broken straps). But between the inadvertent acquisition of a pet pig, an attack by a flock of seagulls, Greg getting medical attention at the vet, and baby brother Manny managing to knock the parked family car into drive, there's more out-and-out absurdity in this installment than in previous books. Readers won't care, though, and their own family vacations will look downright blissful by comparison. Ages 8–12. Agent: Sylvie Rabineau, RWSG Literary Agency. (Nov.)

From Kirkus Review
You’d think that if anyone would know better, it would be Greg Heffley’s mother.
But no. When she reads an article in Family Frolic magazine about wholesome family road trips, she insists on taking one right now. What ensues is the kind of totally over-the-top mayhem that the Wimpy Kid’s fans have come to expect—and more. The family packs too much stuff to fit into the car, so they decide to tow Dad’s utterly unseaworthy boat as extra cargo space. Mom insists on educational enrichment (learn-to-speak-Spanish CDs, lame-o car games), “real food” (brown-bag “Mommy Meals” instead of fast food) and “authentic” fun (a country fair with no rides but a guess-the-pig’s-weight contest in which the prize is the pig; baby Manny wins). They spend the night in the absolute quintessence of a cruddy motel. Two slapstick driving sequences are both Hollywood-ready and extremely funny, especially in Kinney’s accompanying cartoons; Greg’s free-associative riff on humorless do-gooders who seek to censor such potty-humor classics as a wink-and-a-nod–disguised Captain Underpants will find an appreciative audience. By taking the Heffleys on the road, Kinney both gives himself an almost universally familiar experience to lampoon and places Greg in the rather unusual position of being almost entirely justified in his misanthropy, which is downright refreshing.Every kid—and every parent—who’s ever suffered through a family road trip will feel as one with Greg. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)

References:

Kirkus Review. (2014). [Review of the book Diary of a wimpy kid: The long haul, by J. Kinney]. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jeff-kinney/long-haul/

Publishers Weekly. (n.d.). [Review of the book Diary of a wimpy kid: The long haul, by J. Kinney]. Retrieved from http://www.publishersweekly.com/9781419711893

Library Uses: I would use this book in a display for graphic novels and as a read aloud for a discussion on family.  After reading this book, I would have students to create their won graphic novel similar to this one, that depicts events that occur in their lives on a day to day basis.