I actually cringed at a couple of her scenes when she tried to talk to guys. Rachel is 13 years old (I guess…I don’t think her age was ever explicitly mentioned), but she seems a little naive for her age. The diary is really only mentioned a few times, but what I thought would happen with it did not–and that’s a good thing, because it made the book less predictable. Rachel used it as a place to list all the secrets she was keeping, and to divulge the weird things she found out about people through cleaning their houses.

Though the title of the book is “The Dirt Diary”, I didn’t think the diary itself had that much importance to the story. So Rachel begins a “dirt diary” to try to help her keep track of everything that’s going on in her mind. And to top it all off, she is now the assistant in her mom’s new cleaning business–which includes the houses of the two most popular girls in school. It’s no problem as long as she replaces the money before her mom notices…right? The annual school bake sale is coming up, and she cannot lose to that snooty Allison again. So she *may* have borrowed $300 from her college fund to fly down to see her dad. Rachel’s parents have split up, and her dad moved down to Florida. Rachel Lee is in the 8th grade, but she’s got a lot on her mind before even thinking about making the jump to high school. She never intended to reveal her secrets, but when the hottest guy in school pays her to spy on his girlfriend Rachel decides to get her hands dirty.Ī quick, cute middle grade read. But her new job has surprising perks: enough dirt on the in-crowd to fill up her (until recently) boring diary. Which does not help her already loser-ish reputation.

Working for her mom’s new house-cleaning business puts Rachel in the dirty bathrooms of the most popular kids in the eighth grade. Rachel Lee didn’t think anything could be worse than her parents splitting up. She was wrong.

The dirt diary book