Hard Luck

What's inside (9 sections)

1. The friend with a girlfriend
2. Family is forever, allegedly
3. Easter and the diamond ring
4. The Magic 8 Ball
5. Yearbook Club and the true or false test
6. The egg in the yard
7. What the book is, and what it is not
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

Hard Luck opens with a problem that every kid in the back seat of a family car has thought about: what happens when your best friend gets a girlfriend and stops needing you. Greg Heffley is in middle school, and Rowley Jefferson has started going out with Abigail, a girl who has opinions about everything and a way of agreeing with herself. Rowley, being Rowley, agrees with Abigail about all of it. Greg is left on the outside of a friendship that used to be his whole social life, and the book is about the months he spends trying to replace it, avoid it, or explain it away.

This is the eighth Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. Amulet Books published it in 2013, it runs 217 pages, and the ISBN is 9781419711329. Kinney's formula is fully settled by this point: short entries, big type, a cartoon on most spreads, and Greg narrating his own life with the confidence of a boy who has never once considered that he might be the problem. What makes this one interesting is that the formula is used on a subject that actually hurts. Losing a friend to a first relationship is a real middle school wound, and Kinney gets the sting of it without ever letting Greg admit that it stings.

The friend with a girlfriend

Abigail is not a villain. She is just a girl with a plan, and the plan involves Rowley doing what she says. Rowley agrees with everything she says because he is polite and because he likes her, and the combination makes him unavailable in a way that Greg cannot argue with. It is not that Rowley has abandoned him. It is that Rowley now has somewhere else to be.

Greg's response is to keep showing up anyway. He hangs around the edges of their time together, makes jokes that do not land, and tries to find a third wheel position that neither of them asked for. Kinney draws these scenes with a lot of white space and a lot of Greg's face, and the drawings carry the embarrassment better than the text could. You can see the exact moment Greg realizes he is the odd one out, and you can see him decide to pretend he did not notice.

There is a small, sharp observation buried in the comedy. Greg does not miss Rowley as a person so much as he misses having a person. He misses the guaranteed seat at lunch, the default partner for group work, the friend who will go along with a scheme. That is a selfish way to miss somebody, and it is also a very accurate way for a thirteen-year-old to miss somebody. Kinney does not underline it. He lets Greg's behavior make the point.

Greg also cannot admit that Abigail might be good for Rowley. She is bossy and a little boring, but she pays attention to him, and Rowley seems happy. Greg's inability to be happy for his friend is the emotional engine of the book, and it is not resolved by a speech. It is resolved by a breakup, which is a lot messier and more believable.

Family is forever, allegedly

Susan Heffley has a theory. Friends come and go, she tells Greg, but family is forever. It is the kind of thing a mother says when her son has been moping in his room, and it is both true and useless. Greg hears it as an instruction to spend more time with his family, which is the last thing he wants.

So he tries to branch out. His first attempt is Fregley, the strange neighbor kid with the wide eyes and the personal space problem. Fregley is not a replacement for Rowley, and Greg knows it, but he is available, and availability is the only quality Greg is screening for at this point. The experiment goes badly in the way that Fregley experiments always go badly, which is to say it goes exactly as Greg should have predicted.

Meanwhile the Heffley house is preparing for Easter. Susan has invited the extended family, which means aunts, uncles, cousins and a grandmother, and which means Greg has to be pleasant for an entire day. The book uses the holiday to open up the family history, and the family history is where the plot actually lives.

I like the way Kinney writes Susan in this book. Yes, she is the embarrassing mom who wants family togetherness. She is also the person who remembers Meemaw, who keeps the photographs, and who understands, better than anyone else, how quickly a family can turn on itself over money. Her enthusiasm is genuine and her wariness is genuine, and the two sit together without contradiction. That is more character work than this series usually attempts.

The branching-out plan produces exactly one result. Fregley becomes popular. Not because he changes, and not because Greg helps him, but because some students discover that he can "chew" food with his belly button. It is a disgusting trick, it is exactly the kind of thing that would make a kid famous for a week, and it destroys Greg's plan.

The sequence is pure Wimpy Kid. Greg finds a social opening, tries to exploit it, and watches the person he was trying to use become more popular than he is. There is a drawing of Fregley performing for a crowd that does most of the work, and there is Greg in the corner, calculating. The joke is on Greg, as usual, and Kinney lets it run long enough to be funny without turning cruel.

What I notice now, reading it as an adult, is how little malice there is in Fregley. He is not trying to steal Greg's life. He is just being himself, and himself happens to include a bizarre physical talent. Greg's schemes fail because other people have their own momentum. That is a decent lesson to bury in a book about a kid who never learns it.

Easter and the diamond ring

The family gathers, and the old photographs come out. In one picture, Meemaw is wearing a diamond ring. In another, taken later, the ring is gone. Nobody remembers what happened to it, and somebody suggests that she hid it in a plastic Easter egg, the kind she used to fill and hide in the backyard for the children.

The family believes this immediately. That is the funniest part. A group of adults with jobs and mortgages decide, on the evidence of two photographs and a memory of an old woman's habits, that there is a diamond in the yard, and they go outside with shovels and flashlights and tear the place apart.

They find nothing.

Susan is not sorry. She says, more or less, that she hopes nobody finds it, because if the ring turns up the family will fight over the money. That line lands differently depending on how old you are when you read it. As a kid, it is a boring adult comment in the middle of an egg hunt. As an adult, it is the most truthful sentence in the book. Families do fight over inheritances, and the fight is usually worse than the thing being fought over.

Greg watches all of this with his usual self-interest. He is not grieving Meemaw. He is not worried about the family. He is wondering whether any of this will affect him, and whether there is a way to profit from it. The gap between what the adults are feeling and what Greg is thinking is the book's best comic engine.

The Magic 8 Ball

Greg finds a Magic 8 Ball under Rodrick's bed. It is a toy, a plastic sphere filled with cloudy liquid and a twenty-sided die, and it answers questions with phrases like "yes," "no" and "ask again later." Greg starts using it to make decisions.

This is the plot device that holds the middle of the book together, and it is a good one for a character like Greg. He does not want to take responsibility for his choices, so he hands the choices to an object. The object is random, which means his life becomes a series of random outcomes, which he then interprets as fate. Kinney does not need to say anything about superstition. The behavior is the argument.

The ball also gets him into trouble. He joins the Yearbook Club, a decision the ball presumably endorsed, and the club turns out to involve actual work. Greg is not interested in work. He is interested in the status of being on yearbook, and the status does not survive contact with the duties.

Then comes the social studies test. It is true or false, Greg is unsure of the answers, and he has the ball with him. He drops it in the middle of the test, it breaks, and he is caught. The vice principal calls his mother and threatens summer school.

The scene works because it is so small. Greg is not caught in a grand scheme. He is caught with a broken toy and a guilty face, and the consequences are real: his mother is humiliated, his summer is at risk, and his explanation is pathetic. Kinney is good at this scale of disaster. Nothing in the book is bigger than a school, and everything in the book feels enormous to the person inside it.

Yearbook Club and the true or false test

The yearbook assignment is the book's cruelest joke. Greg has to take photographs, and the photographs he has to take are of Fregley as Most Popular and of Rowley and Abigail as Cutest Couple. The two people who have made his year miserable are being honored, and he is the one holding the camera.

He quits.

It is the first decision in the book that Greg makes without the ball, and it is a decision to walk away rather than participate in his own humiliation. You can read it as petty. You can also read it as the last shred of self-respect of a kid who has spent months pretending he is fine. Kinney does not tell you which one it is, and that ambiguity is why Greg works as a character rather than a cautionary poster.

Around this point Greg takes the broken Magic 8 Ball and throws it into Gramma's yard. It is a tantrum disguised as a clean break. He is done with the thing that made his decisions, except that he is not done at all, because the ball is now in the one place he cannot easily get it back from.

Then Rowley and Abigail break up. Greg gets his friend back, or the possibility of his friend back, and he does not know what to do with it. He has spent the whole book wanting Rowley to be available, and now that he is, Greg hesitates. That hesitation is the most honest beat in the story. Wanting something and being ready for it are different things, and Greg is thirteen.

The egg in the yard

Greg goes back to Gramma's yard to look for the ball. He shakes it, or he prepares to, and instead he spots a plastic Easter egg. Inside is Meemaw's diamond ring.

This is the plot's one genuine surprise, and it arrives because Greg was looking for something else. He does not tell the family. He takes the egg and hides it in his mother's closet, so that nobody will find it and nobody will fight over it. It is a strange, secret act of mercy from a boy who has spent two hundred pages being selfish, and Kinney does not make a big speech about it.

The gesture is also a little cowardly. Greg does not sit the family down and explain. He hides the ring and lets the search end in failure. He protects the family from itself without giving them the chance to prove they could handle it. That is the kind of moral act a real thirteen-year-old might manage: right outcome, murky motives, no adult conversation.

After that, Greg decides that he has to make the big decisions himself. It is not a dramatic conversion. He does not throw away his comics or start doing his homework. He just stops asking a plastic ball what to do, which for him is growth.

He and Rowley become friends again. The ending is deliberately low-key. Greg writes that his mother says friends come and go and family is forever, and maybe that is true, but for now he and Rowley are good. The last line does not resolve the theme so much as set it down gently. Friendships at that age are provisional, and the book is honest enough to leave it that way.

What the book is, and what it is not

Hard Luck is a slight entry in the series. The plot is a set of episodes, the Easter search and the Magic 8 Ball and the yearbook, rather than one strong arc. Characters drift in and out. Abigail exists mostly as an obstacle, and Fregley exists mostly as a gag. If you are looking for the emotional depth of the first book, or the tight structure of the best ones, this is not the volume you hand to a skeptic.

Greg is as selfish as ever, which is the joke and also the limit. He learns something, but he does not learn much, and the book is careful not to reward him with a personality transplant. Some readers find that exhausting. I find it consistent. The series has never pretended Greg is growing into a good person. It has only promised that he will keep being recognizably himself.

The cartoons do a lot of the characterization. Greg's posture, Rowley's open face, Abigail's flat stare, the way an adult is drawn from the waist down so you only see the hand on a shoulder. Kinney can put a joke in a single line of ink, and the book's pacing depends on that. Take the drawings out and the story would feel thin. With them, it moves.

What the book does well is the specific sadness of being left behind by a friend who is not doing anything wrong. Greg's jealousy is ugly and recognizable, and the resolution does not pretend that the friendship is unchanged. Rowley comes back, but the reader knows it will happen again, with another girl or another friend or another year. That is not a flaw in the book. It is the truth the book is built on.

The Easter material is the best part. A family tearing up a yard over a ring that may not exist, while the grandmother's actual memory sits in the photo albums, is a very good joke about inheritance and greed. Susan's hope that nobody finds it is the kind of line that makes you stop for a second before you laugh.

I read this one quickly, the way the series is meant to be read, and then I thought about the ring in the closet for a while afterward. Greg never tells anyone. The family never knows. Meemaw's ring is safe and invisible, which is probably the best outcome and definitely not the honest one. That seems right for a book about a boy who is learning, slowly, that being a person means making choices nobody will thank you for.

FAQ

Is Hard Luck part of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series?

Yes. It is the eighth book in Jeff Kinney's series, published by Amulet Books in 2013, and it follows Greg Heffley through middle school.

Does Greg find Meemaw's diamond ring in Hard Luck?

He finds it inside a plastic Easter egg while looking for his Magic 8 Ball. He hides the egg in his mother's closet instead of telling the family.

Do Greg and Rowley stay friends?

Yes. Rowley and Abigail break up, and Greg decides to make his own decisions instead of relying on the Magic 8 Ball, so the two boys become friends again.