Stink: Hamlet and Cheese

Megan McDonald's Hamlet and Cheese is a week at Shakespeare camp for 7 year olds, with pool-noodle sword fights and some truly excellent insults.

What happens

Stink only signs up because his friend Sophie mentions the good bits. Shipwrecks. Sword fights. Mad kings and murders. Then she mentions the part that really seals it. At this camp you get to swear.

Not actual swearing, obviously. Shakespeare insults. Toad-spotted bum bailey, that sort of thing.

So off he goes, and discovers that every other Sprite at camp is a girl. Worse, his sometimes-friend-most-times-enemy Riley Rottenberger is at camp too. And Riley has announced a prediction. Before the week is out, Stink is getting a big fat sloppy wet one.

The week turns into two weeks in one. There is the camp Stink actually wanted, with tongue twisters, fake dying, a proper outdoor Macbeth and two real actors who teach the children to duel. And there is the campaign to avoid being kissed, which involves a cardboard shield with a big red NO sign painted over a pair of lips.

Reading it is mostly the pleasure of the language. Stink talks in a Shakespeare-ish mash all week. Hie thee hither. Thy wench be up yonder stairs. Spleen face, canker blossom, maggot pie. Your reader will be trying these out at the dinner table within a day of starting it, and honestly that is half the point.

The best bit of the plot turns on a theatre superstition, which is a lovely thing for a child to pick up. You never say Macbeth out loud before the play. Stink says it three times. Then a pug gets loose during the witches' scene, and Stink is quite certain the whole disaster is his fault.

It moves very fast. Every few pages there is a knock-knock joke, a list of daft insults, or a scene set out like a script with STINK and RILEY in capitals.

There is a lot of American in it, by the way. Mom, candy, soda, Popsicle. Nothing a 7 year old will trip over, but you will hear it if you read it aloud.

Stink is much more interested in the sword fighting than in any of the kissing business, and if that is your reader's position too, they will get on with him very well.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Stink and the Incredible Shrinking Kid is in the library too. That time the problem is not girls. It is the fact that Stink has measured three feet, eight inches tall every single morning for what feels like forever, and his sister Judy is the one holding the ruler.