The Last Straw is book three of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney.

The New York Times

A few weeks ago, Ethan Bloom’s mother wanted to take him to a Japanese restaurant in Brooklyn for a special dinner. Ethan, 10, had a request. Could he take Diary of a Wimpy Kid?

His mother, Naomi Weinstein, was floored. “He reads fine, but he doesn’t love reading,” she said. “He was smitten by this book.”

Reports of so-called reluctant readers inhaling the Wimpy Kid series, which chronicles the rude, crude and hapless travails of Greg Heffley, its middle-school narrator, echo around the country and across the Internet. Countless schoolboys have recorded video reviews of the books and uploaded them to YouTube. Facebook fan groups have been organized in honor of Wimpy Kid. Some grade-school teachers are even planning parties next week to welcome the newest installment in the series, which is printed in a block letter font with at least one cartoon per page.

The craze is not one of Harry Potter proportions, and some adults deplore the book’s slapstick violence, sarcastic tone and heavy reliance on illustration. But children, of course, love all these aspects.

“I relate to Greg a lot because he’s way too average,” said Ethan Bloom, who was, despite his enthusiasm, instructed not to take his book to the restaurant. “I don’t get bullied as bad as Greg, but my brother, Josh, is way rude to me like Rodrick, Greg’s brother.”

The franchise has been a sleeper hit for Amulet Books, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, and for the author, Jeff Kinney, who lives in Plainville, Mass., with his wife and two young sons. Kinney started the Wimpy Kid as a series of online cartoons on the Web site FunBrain.com. The first book, published in 2007 and billed as a “novel in cartoons,” has spent 89 weeks on The New York Times’ children’s bestseller list and has been translated into 28 languages. According to the publisher, there are 10 million copies in print of the first two books and a third title, a do-it-yourself version that lets children write their own story. A Wimpy Kid movie is being cast. The latest book, The Last Straw, is being introduced today with a printing of a million copies.

Published on lined paper in the form of journal entries, the books tell, in pitch-perfect voice, of Greg’s hilarious and mortifying adventures at home and school. Greg, who is finely attuned to social pecking orders, writes that he is “around 52nd or 53rd most popular this year.” He is also lazy and manipulative, always choosing to do what is expedient rather than what is right — qualities that place him somewhere on the continuum between Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson, and make him so appealing to readers 8 to 12 years old, especially boys.

Greg is “not a role model in any sense,” said Kinney, 37, who said he had received more than 30,000 e-mail messages about the books (some from boys who wanted to see photographs of Greg). “He’s narcissistic not because he’s a bad person but he’s not completely formed. Most of the humor comes from his very deep flaws.”

Kinney, who still keeps his day job as the design director for an Internet company, where he created poptropica.com, a game site for children, said that as a boy in Maryland: “I was very average, a standard issue kid. But Greg is my worst parts, amplified.”

At first he intended the books for adults, as a Wonder Years-type backward glance at an awkward age. “I didn’t think kids could understand the irony of the book,” he said. “But I’ve been alarmed and delighted that they do.”

Kids do indeed get it. Alex Ring, 8, from Newton, Mass., wrote in an e-mail message that his favorite character in the book was Greg’s best friend, Rowley, because “he doesn’t know what he’s doing but everyone laughs at what he does anyway.”

Greg tries to play jokes on him, he continued, “because Rowley is so dumb, but Rowley doesn’t get the joke but ends up the hero always in the end.”

Alex’s mother, Debbie Drucker, a real estate agent, described her son in a telephone interview as a boy who would rather be playing sports than reading. “But these books are the first that captured his interest,” she said. “He knows the boys are naughty and not PC, and he loves that. It’s not a big message book as opposed to the other stuff we try to cram down his throat. I’m just happy to have him read.”

Some parents object to the way the books celebrate a disrespectful, mean-spirited kid. Others deplore its cartoons as pandering to young readers, a dilution of text and language.

But many parents and educators applaud it as a visually friendly gateway for otherwise unwilling readers, who feel a sense of pride in their ability to devour the books. Carolyn Anbar, the children’s book buyer at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, N.J., said that when children ask for the next Wimpy Kid book, only to be told they have to wait, “Parents are asking, what can they read in the meantime?” (Her suggestions include Dan Gutman’s My Weird School series and the Bone books by Jeff Smith).

Other educators say the Wimpy Kid books are not merely transitional but have their own intrinsic value. For a generation steeped in the Internet, video games and television, the series, with its sketchily drawn cartoons that are integrated into the text, may feel more comfortable than a traditional text-dense book.

“It’s not dumbing down the text,” said Lisa Von Drasek, the children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education. “The illustrations give more information. The kids who don’t need illustration aren’t losing anything by reading this, but kids who are visual learners have an added depth to the story they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Another bonus is the book’s particular appeal to boys, said Jon Scieszka, author of children’s books like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and creator of guysread.com, which recommends books for boys. Kinney, he noted, deliberately draws each boy with distinct characteristics, while “the girls look almost exactly alike — they’re objects of mystery and terror.”

“That’s a truism of how boys at that age see girls and is part of what makes these books so inviting and so funny,” he said.