Stink and the Incredible Super-Galactic Jawbreaker

Megan McDonald's Stink and the Incredible Super-Galactic Jawbreaker is a funny story for 7 year olds about a boy who discovers that complaining works.

What happens

Stink Moody buys the biggest jawbreaker he has ever seen. Bigger than a marble, bigger than a golf ball, and it changes colour and flavour as you go. He licks it for a whole week. Through the chalky bit, through the grapefruit bit, through the fiery middle, right down to a teeny pea.

And it never breaks his jaw. Not once. It does not even stretch his mouth.

So Stink writes a letter. A proper one, with a greeting and a body and a closing, exactly the way Mrs D. taught the class. Eleven days later a box turns up with ten pounds of jawbreakers inside it.

His sister Judy works out that is 21,280 of them. Stink works out something else entirely. If one letter got him this, what would four letters get him?

The free stuff starts arriving. Microbots, a crate of sweets, a phone call about monkey pencils and a pass to the zoo. Judy is green with envy and tells him it is basically stealing. Mum tells him to stop writing letters.

The bit that makes it more than a joke is the envelope. Somewhere in the boring post there is one addressed in super-messy writing that Stink cannot be bothered to open. You will spot it long before he does.

Reading it is fast and noisy and full of arguing. Stink and Judy bicker on nearly every page, in the way of a brother and sister who are actually rather fond of each other. Did too. Did not. Did too.

Idioms are all over this one, which is the other reason it turns up in classrooms. Stink has just learned them and cannot stop pointing them out, so a kid in a candy store and sour grapes and when it rains it pours all arrive with somebody explaining them. If your child is at the stage of asking what raining cats and dogs means, they will have a lovely time hunting for more.

It is very American, mind you. Candy rather than sweets, the mail rather than the post, and Stink is in second grade. Nothing your reader cannot follow, but expect a few questions.

What to read next

For the same family from the other side of the bedroom door, Judy Moody Was in a Mood is in the library. Judy gets to narrate that one, and she starts it by refusing to give up the summer and going to school in her pyjama bottoms.