Middle-schooler Greg Heffley nimbly sidesteps his father's attempts to change Greg's wimpy ways until his father threatens to send him to military school.

Greg Heffley tells about his summer vacation and his attempts to steer clear of trouble when he returns to middle school and tries to keep his older brother Rodrick from telling everyone about Greg's most humiliating experience of the summer.

After his best friend ditches him, Greg Heffley decides to take a leap of faith and turn his decisions over to chance. Will a roll of the dice turn things around, or is Greg's life destined to be just another hard-luck story?

When seventh-grader Jake McQuade mistakes the world's first ingestible knowledge pills for jelly beans, he suddenly knows all about physics and geometry and can speak Swahili (though Spanish would be a lot more useful)--but his sort-of girlfriend Grace thinks they can use his new found brilliance to save their middle school from the new principal, who is conspiring to get it shut down.

Jamie Kelly looks back through her very oldest diaries, and is amazed at how dumb she used to be considering how smart she is now.

"Eleven-year-old Kylie's friends seem so much more mature than she is. And with middle school just a summer away, she's worried her friends might leave her behind, especially because she keeps embarrassing them. So Kylie applies her scientific brain to solve the problem and comes up with the Everybody Experiment: Hypothesis: Kylie Stanton will be mature if she does what everybody else does. Experiment: This summer, when all of Kylie's friends do something,...

Katie starts to realize that doing what you love always makes the better sweeter.

Supremely confident middle school student Nate Wright manages make getting detention from every one of his teachers in the same day seem like an achievement.

Seventh graders Fonda, Drew, and Ruthie develop a friendship strong enough to tackle whatever middle school--and puberty--throws at them next.

Told in different voices, on Centerlight Island, halfway between the United States and Canada, middle-schoolers Keenan and ZeeBee team up to seek gold rumored to be hidden there a famous gangster.