Your child has read Nikki Maxwell's diary to pieces and wants more of it. Here are six books that each give back a different piece of what Dork Diaries does. The useful thing is to work out which part your child is actually chasing and hand them that one.
It helps to be clear about what Dork Diaries actually is, because these books each copy a different piece of it. Nikki's book is an illustrated diary kept by a middle-school girl, and it runs on social anxiety, a crush, a mean girl, and drawing. Almost nothing else does all four. Diary of a Wimpy Kid shares the diary and the cartoons exactly, but Greg is a boy and he's meaner than Nikki ever is. Big Nate: In a Class by Himself shares the school and the comics-inside-the-book, with a narrator who's sure he's magnificent. Timmy Failure shares the illustrated-loser-narrator and turns it into a detective spoof. Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life shares the journal and the drawings and has a real story with real sadness underneath the gags. Two things are worth knowing above the rest. Max Crumbly is by Rachel Renée Russell — the same author as Dork Diaries — which makes it the closest thing here to a sure bet: same handwriting, same sketches, same narrator chattering straight at your child. The joke is that this time the narrator is a boy. And Awkward is the odd one out and probably the best book on the shelf. Svetlana Chmakova wrote and drew it, it's a proper full-color comic with no diary and no doodles in the margins, and it's the only one that gives back Nikki's actual world: a girl in the middle of it, cliques, and the art club at war with the science club. It's where a child goes when the diary format starts to feel young.