Tom Gates keeps a notebook chronicling the entire school year: planning his birthday party, getting his band ready to perform at the school dance, and hoping his dad doesn't embarrass him by showing up to school in a dinosaur costume! This eye-catching title will appeal to fans of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It follows a similar format, with doodled illustrations and various fun fonts sprinkled liberally across each page. Unfortunately, it falls short in the areas of character and plot development, and the humor is very understated.

It was only when looking this book up on Goodreads that I discovered it was the third in a series (this is not written anywhere on the book itself, so there is a good chance they were not intended to be read in a specific order), but I was able to jump in mid-series easily. This series was originally published in the UK and has many very British terms. These are explained in a glossary at the end of the book, which I did not think to look for as I read. However, it was not too difficult to figure out what the different words meant within the context.