Flat Stanley

Jeff Brown's Flat Stanley is a very silly adventure for 7 year olds about a boy who wakes up half an inch thick.

What happens

The bulletin board over his bed comes down in the night. Stanley Lambchop isn't hurt. He would have slept right through it if his little brother hadn't shouted.

The doctor has a look at him, says this is mostly how it goes with these cases, and sends him home. His mother takes his measurements. Four feet tall. About a foot wide. Half an inch thick.

And then everyone just gets on with it.

That is what makes the book so funny. Nobody panics. Mr and Mrs Lambchop are mainly concerned that their sons speak politely (there is a running joke about "hay is for horses" that your reader will start saying at you). Stanley slides under closed doors. He gets lowered down a drain on a long shoelace to fetch his mother's ring, while two passing policemen ask her if her yo-yo is stuck.

He gets posted to California in a brown paper envelope with an egg-salad sandwich and a toothbrush case full of milk.

His brother Arthur, meanwhile, is going quietly mad with jealousy. He tries sliding under a door and bangs his head. He piles encyclopaedias on top of himself in the middle of the night and asks his parents to add more. Those two are the real story here, not the flatness.

There's a proper adventure in the middle involving a museum, some art thieves and a disguise Stanley absolutely hates. It's tense enough to be exciting and daft enough that nobody could be frightened by it, although the thieves do say out loud what they'd do to anyone who tried to catch them.

The part to know about comes later. Being famous wears off, and then children start shouting things at Stanley in the street about the way he looks. He cries about it at night and asks his brother not to tell their parents. It's over quickly and it's the tenderest bit in the book, but if your child has been on the wrong end of that sort of thing, read it with them.

It's an American book from the 1960s and it sounds like one, right down to a moment where Stanley is disgusted at being made to dress as a girl.

What to read next

If the flying is the bit they love, Stanley in Space picks him up again. This time the President rings the house, because a planet nobody has heard of has sent a message and someone peaceful needs to go and say hello.