Stink and the World’s Worst Super-Stinky Sneakers

Megan McDonald's Stink and the World's Worst Super-stinky Sneakers is a very silly book for 7 year olds about a boy who turns out to have a world-class nose.

What happens

Stink Moody has a school trip to the smelliest place on earth. Well, to the museum's Gross-Me-Out exhibit, which as far as he's concerned is the same thing.

There are Musical Farts. There's a Burp-O-Meter. There's a Vomit Machine. There's a walk-through nose with a Hall of Mucus in it, which his friends Webster and Sophie absolutely will not go near in case of giant bogeys.

Stink goes in on his own and comes out having learned how bogeys are made. Not pretty, he reports.

Then his teacher points him at the one exhibit nobody else will touch. Match the body smell to the body part it came from.

Stink sniffs the first bottle, clutches his chest and collapses on the floor. Then he leaps up shouting gotcha.

And here's the thing. He gets them all right. Feet. Bad breath. Armpit. Then a dozen more, rotten eggs and mothballs and skunk and dog breath and old fish, without a single miss. By lunchtime the whole class is calling him The Nose.

So when a flyer goes round about a smelly sneaker contest in the park in a fortnight, Stink is very confident indeed. The trouble is that Sophie has had to wear wellies to school because hers are so bad, and his teacher's daughter owns a pair known in that house as the Smell Monsters.

The whole thing knows exactly what it's doing. Stink has read the whole S encyclopedia and will tell you anything. A person can smell about ten thousand different smells. An ant has five noses. A boy moth can smell a girl moth from a block away. Even walruses get dandruff.

That's the honest warning, really. If you would rather your dinner table stayed free of facts about earwax and mucus for the next fortnight, pick a different one. If your reader would love nothing more, this is a gift.

A word on the wrapping. It's American, so it's sneakers rather than trainers, second grade rather than Year Three, and the smells have American names. None of it gets in the way, and the pictures of a boy sniffing a bottle of armpit are universal.

What to read next

His big sister turns up at the end of the day to complain that she didn't get to go to the Stinky Museum. If she's the one your reader wants to follow home, Judy's own book is waiting for them, and she starts her school year in a mood so bad that even new pencils can't shift it.