Stink and the Shark Sleepover

Stink and the Shark Sleepover by Megan McDonald is a short, funny adventure for 7 year olds about a night spent inside an aquarium.

What happens

Stink Moody is seven and three quarters, completely obsessed with sharks, and (whatever he tells you) not brilliant at sleepovers. He's walked out of one because of a glow-in-the-dark Darth Vader poster and another because of a chipmunk in his gran's attic.

So when his parents win a family sleepover at the aquarium, he has two feelings at exactly the same time. Sharks! And oh no, sleeping somewhere that isn't his bed.

He packs a shark sleeping bag, a stuffed tiger shark to use as a pillow, a shark-tooth necklace and shark slippers. The sleepover is on Friday. He starts packing on Monday.

The night itself is one good thing after another. A scavenger hunt round the tanks with his friends Webster and Sophie, hunting something that looks like a horse, something that looks like a bat and something that looks like a brain. A jellyfish wrangler called Marco who makes a smack of jellies light up in the dark. A glass tunnel with sand tiger sharks gliding over their heads.

There's a lot of real information tucked in and none of it reads like a lesson. Sharks gulp air at the surface and hold it in their stomachs to help them float. Shark skin is rough like a cat's tongue. A jellyfish has no brain, no bones and no blood.

Riley Rottenberger is there too, playing Would You Rather at Stink all night and cackling at her own jokes. Would you rather freeze on Pluto at minus three hundred degrees, or get your insides sucked out by a giant sea anemone? Your reader will start doing this to you in the car. Consider yourself warned.

Nothing in it is frightening. The sharks stay behind glass, the peril is entirely imaginary, and the worst thing that happens to anybody all night is a hermit crab going missing. It's a complete story too, beginning to end, and it doesn't trail off.

What to read next

If your reader enjoys Stink's company, his big sister has a whole shelf of her own and Judy Moody Was in a Mood is where she starts. Judy comes back from the summer holidays in a genuinely terrible temper, with no new T-shirt and a new classroom to get used to.