The Dirt Diary by Anna Staniszewski
Book Name: The Dirt Diary
Author: Anna Staniszewski
Star Rating: ✦✦✦✧✧
Age Rating: 10+
Summary:
WANTED: Maid for the most popular kids in 8th grade.Cleaning up after the in-crowd gets Rachel all the best dirt.
Rachel can’t believe she has to give up her Saturdays to scrub other people’s toilets. So. Gross. But she kinda, sorta stole $287.22 from her college fund that she’s got to pay back ASAP or her mom will ground her for life. Which is even worse than working for her mother’s new cleaning business. Maybe. After all, becoming a maid is definitely not going to help her already loserish reputation.
But Rachel picks up more than smelly socks on the job. As a maid to some of the most popular kids in school, Rachel suddenly has all the dirt on the 8th grade in-crowd. Her formerly boring diary is now filled with juicy secrets. And when her crush offers to pay her to spy on his girlfriend, Rachel has to decide if she’s willing to get her hands dirty…
What I liked about Rachel: Rachel is a bold character with an actual motive for the things she does. She doesn’t want to tag along with her mother’s new cleaning business, but she needs to because she has to pay back money that she took from her college fund.
The story immediately starts with the conflict, which is Rachel’s crazy plan.
Storyline Development:
The story developed pretty nicely, but some things were a little odd. Rachel wasn’t very offended by the nickname of ‘Booger Crap.’ And I’ve been to middle school, real middle schoolers don’t say the curses ‘Holy bean dip.’ Neither do adults. So the fact that Rachel picked up those ‘swears’ from her father is pretty unrealistic.
Her crush on the most popular boy at school was well-founded because, at one point in their lives, everyone has had a shallow crush on a person just because of their looks or popularity. When Rachel accepts the job to spy on other people, she hesitates, which shows that she knows what she’s doing is wrong. However, she takes the job anyway!
The morality of this is explained easily: people would do anything for money. Staniszewski does a great job of illustrating that theme in the book.
In addition, Rachel’s divorced parents are a central focus of the story due to them being part of the story’s main conflict. In the end, the way Staniszewski made sure that everything was connected was pretty awesome. Keeping the plot altogether is often difficult for some authors, so it’s a great skill to have.
Worldbuilding:
There isn’t much worldbuilding to focus on since the story is set in the modern world.
Notes: Rachel isn’t a very good spy. And it is evident in the fact that she is caught by Brynn when she is snooping through the girl’s room.
Brynn is a nasty girl who purposefully makes her room extra messy in order to make Rachel’s job harder. She mocks Rachel and her mother for being cleaning ladies and is just an all around brat.
Some common tropes that were explored in this book include:
- Crush on popular boy
- ‘Loser’ or ‘unpopular’ main character
- Main character makes a bad decision and must remedy it by the end
- Everything is forgiven with a happy ending
- The antagonist is a snobby mean girl
- Deadbeat dad trope