Philippa Wendy Joyner

The Diary of Dione Brown Philippa Wendy Joyner

The Diary of Dione Brown: It's Gonna be a Long One at this Tortured Age! presents the protagonist Dione, a 12-year old girl approaching puberty but believes she has only her diary to confide in. Dione is the youngest of three siblings, the only girl, the daughter of a rather wildly personified mother who tries to encourage detox and scientific cooking as basic elements of a healthy life-style alongside projecting onto all of her offspring her own unrealized young adulthood dreams. Dione is also the daughter of a surgeon who finds his wife baffling, and the best friend of Jenny Thistlethwaite who Dione's brothers think looks like a nocturnal flamingo. Dione is facing a challenging time of life (just like Greg Heffley in Diary of a Wimpy Kid), and realizes that even her own mother doesn't relish in explaining puberty to her daughter. In fact, Mrs Brown designs a fail-safe method of an online tutor to engage with Dione over a breakfast of eggs and soldiers. This is only one example of Dione's mother's nuances in life. Dione is sometimes engaged in attending the Women's Institute meetings with her mother, to which, at first, she is utterly abhorrent. However, meeting Mrs Mopp (a pensioner) proves to Dione that life should be looked at from an outsider's perspective to make it all the more bearable. Dione finds this most useful, and also finds in Mrs Mopp a true friend. Dione ultimately realizes that her fears of becoming a teenager are comically not as ill-fated as she thought as the book pans out in a humoristic and elementary fashion: A) Will Dione live through puberty?B) When should Dione decide if she should be a lesbian or not?C) Can Dione really allow her mother to fancy the Geography teacher who has just returned from a sabbatical in Norway and now has high cheek bones?D) Should Dione's father really be taking his kids on joyrides in his Audi R8 purely to use up the petrol and get the quota for next year