Former (Dutch) teacher here! Diary of a wimpy kid is easy reading for a lot of kids and I always found that the really engrossing books could help them move on to their actual reading level. For my students who liked comic mischief in class, I could always get them hooked to reading with The Saga of Darren Shan.
Don't let the 'horror' genre fool you: the story is dark and funny. Based on the books you named I think your kid might love it!
Not technical at all, I work in Learning & Development at a company. I am always reading the comments and try to learn, but sometimes I have really no clue what you guys are talking about haha!
Yesterday someone was expleaning about adblocker and all the comments were like: "Yeah, who can live without it..." Well, me I guess? And I saw one that was highly recommended so I downloaded it, because why not try it out right? But apparently it's not for your phone. Or I didn't have the right app to support it on my phone.
I was thinking about asking it in the comments of the thread, but like you said: I think a lot of people here have a tech background and although everyone is very nice, I think the explanation might go over my head.
I don't want to give people the feeling I get when I'm trying to explain to my mom over the phone how she can e-mail a file on her computer. It can be very frustrating ;)
It's possible that she hasn't got aphantasia, but something called face blindness (prosopagnosia). The Wikipedia might be an interesting read for you guys!