California Diaries Books in Order

This reading order guide provides the complete list of California Diaries books in order, from the very first to the latest, so you won’t miss anything!

About the California Diaries Series

Growing up is messy. It is confusing and sometimes painful, and not every story about being a teenager wraps up neatly at the end. That is exactly what makes the California Diaries series by Ann M. Martin feel so different from other middle grade books — it does not look away from the hard stuff. This is a spin-off of The Baby-Sitters Club, but if that series felt like a warm afternoon in Stoneybrook, Connecticut, this one feels like standing at the edge of something much bigger and not being entirely sure you are ready for it.

The series follows a group of students in California, and the whole thing is set up as a school project — every student at their school has to keep a journal, and the books are those journals. That format alone makes everything feel more personal and more honest than a regular novel would. There are no chapter breaks trying to create drama, no narrator stepping back to explain what things mean. It is just a kid, writing in a diary, trying to make sense of what is happening around them and inside them. That intimacy is what pulls readers in from the very first page.

What really sets this series apart from The Baby-Sitters Club is the subject matter. These are not stories about babysitting jobs and weekend sleepovers. The California Diaries deals with eating disorders, alcohol, cancer, and the kind of social pressure that comes with suddenly being thrown into a completely different world. That last part is actually the central conflict of the whole series — the eighth grade gets merged with the high school, which means these kids go overnight from being the oldest students in middle school to being the youngest in a school that goes all the way up to twelfth grade. Anyone who remembers what that kind of shift feels like will understand immediately why that is such a big deal. The hallways are different, the social rules are different, and the people around you are suddenly older in ways that matter.

Ann M. Martin brought in a team of ghostwriters to help tell these stories, which makes sense given how ambitious the series is. Peter Lerangis wrote several of the books, Jeanne Betancourt handled a few others, and Nola Thacker closed out the series with the fifteenth book. Despite having multiple writers behind the scenes, the diary format keeps everything feeling consistent — because each book belongs to a specific character’s voice, and that voice stays true throughout. Amalia’s diaries even have interior illustrations by Stieg Retlin, which adds another layer of personality to her entries and makes her journal feel genuinely handmade.

The series ran for fifteen books in total, all written in first person, all carrying that same honest and sometimes uncomfortable energy that makes the whole thing so hard to put down. For readers who grew up with The Baby-Sitters Club and wanted something that grew up alongside them, the California Diaries was exactly that. And for younger readers discovering it now, it still holds up — because the feelings at the center of these books, the loneliness, the pressure, the desperate need to figure out who you are when everything around you keeps changing, those feelings do not have an expiration date. The series has also reached readers beyond the United States, with the first six books translated into German, where Dawn becomes Julia and Amalia becomes Anna, which is a small detail but also a nice reminder of how widely these stories travelled.

Whether this is a first-time read or a return to something loved a long time ago, the California Diaries is a series that deserves more attention than it usually gets. It is thoughtful, it is real, and it treats its readers like they are smart enough to handle the truth — which, honestly, is all anyone ever really wants from a book.