Flat Stanley: Stanley in Space

Stanley in Space by Jeff Brown is a very silly space story for 7 year olds about an ordinary family being sent to represent the whole of Earth.

What happens

A planet called Tyrra sends a message. It is friendly, it is peaceful and it asks for a visit. The President has a brand new spaceship nobody is supposed to know about, and he needs somebody to go in it. Soldiers would look wrong. So would scientists. What could be more peaceful than an ordinary boy?

So he telephones the Lambchops. Stanley answers, decides it is a prank and announces that he is the King of France. The President then interrupts a cartoon on national television to complain about it.

That is the tone of the whole thing. Everyone is terribly polite while something completely daft is happening.

One thing to say up front if your reader loved the first book. Stanley is not flat in this one. The story mentions it in passing, the bulletin board, the genie, the half lion half elephant, and then gets on with it. He is a round boy in a spaceship.

Mrs Lambchop packs bathroom scales, pretty shades for the portholes, a venetian blind for the exploration window and posters of Mexico and France, because the ship was drab and she was not having that.

The journey takes weeks and the best jokes are the boring bits. An omelette hovering in the air like a frisbee. Mr Lambchop reading with a book floating in front of him. Arthur complaining that if he had known this adventure would be so boring he would never have come.

It is a short book with short chapters, and every grown-up in it speaks like a letter to the newspaper. Hay is for horses, Arthur, not people. Reading it aloud is where the fun really is, because the comedy lives entirely in how straight everybody keeps their face.

There is nothing here to worry about. The aliens are friendly from the first page and the danger, when it turns up, is the kind you can see is going to be sorted out.

What to read next

For a reader who has never met the Lambchops, the place to start is the book where Stanley first goes flat, with a pin board falling on him in the night, a trip through the post as a parcel and a plan to catch some art thieves.