Eleven-and-3/4-year-old snack-loving Lottie Brooks has taken the U.K. and more than 20 international children’s book markets by storm. She’s the star of the middle grade series that bears her name, in which she shares all the funny, cringey, and heartwarming bits of her life in stick figure doodle-filled diary entries. Created by author-illustrator Katie Kirby, the series debuted in 2021 with The Extremely Embarrassing Life of Lottie Brooks (Puffin UK) and has sold 1.6 million copies across the U.K.; Kirby was ranked the #2 bestselling children’s fiction author in the U.K. for 2025, after Jeff Kinney. Last July, Random House Books for Young Readers introduced Lottie to U.S. readers, and the second installment in the series, The Catastrophic Friendship Fails of Lottie Brooks, hits shelves here this week.
In reviews, the Lottie Brooks books have earned comparisons to Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison and to Judy Blume’s novels. That’s fine company, in Kirby’s view. “I was a huge fan of Judy Blume, and I really loved Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” she told PW. “I was a big reader and a big diary keeper when I was Lottie’s age, and books really helped me through those tricky times in my life, especially starting secondary school and all the body changes and friendship changes you go through,” she said. “I wanted to write something like that, something that would have helped me when I was going through all those times.”
Kirby, who had previously worked as an advertising executive, came to children’s books after launching a wildly popular and humorous parenting blog, Hurrah for Gin, and the three nonfiction books it inspired. Though she had always wanted to write for children, it wasn’t until she was approached by Puffin publisher Carmen McCullough that the shift became a reality.
“For years I was trying to find a series that was genuinely hilarious for a tween girl audience, and really struggling,” McCullough said. She then took a more proactive tack and decided to contact Kirby. “I came up with Katie quite quickly, because of her blog and the adult nonfiction that she’d written, which was very tongue-in-cheek, very funny.”
They met for coffee and talked through ideas, and Kirby was keen to come aboard, but the wait was a bit longer as she fulfilled her outstanding adult book contract. “It was about two years later that she sent me some sample pages of the first Lottie book,” McCullough recalled. “I loved them straight away. I remember reading them on the tube on the way home and just properly laughing, which is so rare. I worked on Diary of a Wimpy Kid for years; I worked on Roald Dahl. So, I know the impact of truly funny fiction.”
Young fans around the globe have fully embraced the funny factor but have also found much more to like about Lottie. “A lot of my readers say she’s very relatable because she’s not super pretty, super popular, super clever,” Kirby said. “She often gets things wrong and struggles with saying and doing the right things.” One of the nice comments she gets, Kirby noted, is that “they think of Lottie like a friend, and quite a few people have said they actually get sad when they realize she’s not a real person.”
Many readers have told Kirby that they listen to the Lottie audiobooks before they go to bed. “When they’re going through anxious times, they feel Lottie is a calming presence in their life,” she said. And she believes that the books’ illustrated format, which also features generous spacing, draws in reluctant readers and is dyslexic-friendly as well.
McCullough confirmed those assessments. “What we’ve heard from day one, from parents, teachers, librarians, carers, was, ‘My daughter, my student, they hate reading. They don’t read, but they love this series.’ ” She said that Puffin has done some consumer research on the books’ appeal, too. “It’s the three pillars of the humor, the relatability, and the accessibility of the text and the format,” she said, “with all the illustrations of course, and that diary format, which we know connects with kids so well.”
Young fans have been turning up in droves at Kirby’s U.K. signings and appearances. “Going to the events is the most joyful thing,” McCullough said. “We get a lot of kids turning up in the [Lottie] merch, in their T-shirts, reading the book in the queue as soon as they’ve got their hands on it.” According to McCullough, it’s all part of “a very organic thing that’s sprung up around Lottie launch day, just from the readers. They just get very excited about publication day.” That enthusiasm has resulted in significant preorders. “For the last book [Lottie Brooks vs the Ultra Mean Girls], we had over 14,000 preorders, just in the U.K., which is pretty astonishing.”
Heading Across the Pond
Kirby’s U.S. editor, Elizabeth Stranahan, gives credit and thanks to her U.K. colleagues who have been vocal in their support for the series and for Kirby. “Their enthusiasm was infectious,” she said. “Early on, they shared early stories of getting revisions from Katie and having the jokes passed around the office because they were all laughing so hard. So I was well primed by the time that Chloe Seager [Kirby’s agent] shared the manuscript and I got the chance to read the series for myself.”
Stranahan admires all the special qualities that have drawn fans—in-house and out—to the books, but notes she also saw something else in the Lottie series when it first came her way. “What I appreciate most is how seriously Katie takes the concerns of teens and her kid characters,” she said. “That sincerity and honesty comes across on every page. So, it’s light, and bright, and fresh, but it never talks down to its readers, which I found really vital and charming.”
Stranahan added, “Lottie makes it OK to be embarrassed.” And for all the things that young readers adore about the books, she pointed out that there’s a great hook for parents in the books too. “Katie has such a gift for showing that the parents are very much growing up alongside their kids and they’re also experiencing new things for the first time as parents,” Stranahan said. “There’s such a grace given to the parents, who are funny and supportive, and at times, are shown to be overwhelmed. It makes it a lovely read for adults to share with their kids.”
Random House has hit the ground running with its U.S. editions, launching with a release schedule of a book every seven months. “We were very intentional that we wanted to get the books out quickly,” Stranahan said. The cover for book three, The Mega-Complicated Crushes of Lottie Brooks, due out in September, has been released, and social media partners are helping spread the word about the series over various platforms. Books one and two will be featured at the TLA convention at the end of March.
And new fans will have plenty to look forward to after that. There are eight Lottie books currently available in the U.K., with more in the pipeline, and Kirby offers a full line of Lottie merch on her website.
