Rowley Jefferson (Awesome Friendly Kid)

About the Rowley Jefferson (Awesome Friendly Kid) series

Rowley Jefferson -- Greg Heffley's loyal, easily-excitable best friend from Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- gets his own diary in this spinoff series, and the results are pointedly different from Greg's. Where Greg schemes and complains his way through middle school, Rowley is cheerfully oblivious, endlessly kind, and prone to wildly overselling ordinary events as epic adventures, which makes his version of shared events with Greg land as a funny, good-natured contrast to the original series' more cynical voice.

Jeff Kinney started the series with a short World Book Day tie-in, then expanded Rowley's voice into full-length books: a coming-of-age journal, an over-the-top fantasy adventure Rowley imagines himself into, and two collections of spooky campfire stories Rowley claims to have written himself. The same scribbly cartoon-diary format carries over from the main series, but Rowley's earnest, guileless narration -- and his tendency to get major details of his own stories wrong -- is the joke throughout.

How to read this series

Some familiarity with Diary of a Wimpy Kid helps -- Rowley's diary retells some of the same events from his perspective -- but it isn't required. Read in publication order: the short Diary of Greg Heffley's Best Friend (2018, a World Book Day tie-in that Kinney later expanded), then the full-length Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid: Rowley Jefferson's Journal (2019), Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure (2020), Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories (2021), and its sequel, Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories 2 (2026).

The two Spooky Stories books are anthology-style collections of short campfire tales rather than a single continuous narrative, so they can be read independently of the other three entries.