Timmy decides to partner with Total, who initially "displayed a fair degree of diligence and reliability." As it turned out, the "diligence and reliability were a ruse.
Timmy gets all the "failure" jokes out of the way right from the start, although there is always room for more. Timmy is a self-styled detective and "founder, president and CEO" of Failure, Inc. However, we never see Total in stuffed-toy form as we do Hobbes, leaving the biggest question (one that comes up in almost every review) is Total real or imaginary? My eight-year-old son, who tore this book from my hands the minute he saw it, insists that Total IS real, although Timmy's mother never sees him. In fact, like Calvin, Timmy has an animal companion - Total, the 1,500 pound polar bear who came across the Failure's cat dish while wandering in search of food. Timmy and his life are much more like Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes fame.
The comparisons end there, for the most part. Timmy is most definitely an unreliable narrator with a view of the world as self-centered and skewed as Greg at times. And why is it that parents are willing to to this, ultimately? Because kids, especially kids who don't like to read, LOVE this kind of book! More importantly, it proved that parents are willing to PURCHASE these books, often only available in the pricier hard cover format, and purchase them every year as new additions to the series are relased. If nothing else, the immense popularity of the Wimpy Kid series proved to publishers and booksellers that parents are willing to let their children read "books with pictures" at a time in their academic career when it is assumed they should be beyond this type of book. The existence of either of which does not seem entirely possible without the huge success of Kinney's books coming before. I am all for the merging of graphic novels and middle grade novels and there are actually a few Notebooks Novels I really love, including Amy Ignatow's Popularity Papers series and Tom Angleberger's Origami Yoda series. That said, there is one thing that I will be eternally grateful to Jeff Kinney for - making illustrations an acceptable, desirable quality in middle-grade novels - notebook style or otherwise. Yes: I do not really like the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series for a number of reasons and am skeptical of all books that come in its wake. Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made by Stephan Pastis does join a long line of notebook-novel-knock-offs that have filled the shelves since the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney debuted in 2007. Let's just get this 1,500 lb polar bear in the room out of the way right now: Yes.
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