The Amazing Mexican Secret

The Amazing Mexican Secret, from Jeff Brown and Josh Greenhut's Flat Stanley series, is a short travel adventure for 8 year olds in which a boy gets posted abroad in an envelope.

What happens

Stanley Lambchop is half an inch thick. A huge bulletin board came down on him one night while he was asleep and he has been flat ever since.

There are downsides. People sit on him on the bus. Strangers call him Flatty.

There are upsides too. He slides under doors. He posts very cheaply. And when his friend Carlos comes round, Stanley makes an excellent bullfighter's cape, which is how the book opens, with Stanley swung through the air over his little brother's head.

At breakfast there are huevos rancheros, made with a seasoning Carlos's mother handed over. Carlos explains that the flavour comes from his great grandmother's secret ingredient. Nobody knows what it is. She is a hundred and three, she lives somewhere very remote, she has no telephone, and she would certainly never post it.

So Mrs Lambchop says they will send a messenger, and looks straight past Arthur, who is volunteering, to the son who fits in an envelope.

Stanley wakes up to applause outside a bullring in Mexico City, where the first person he meets accuses him of being a spy.

The jokes are broad and they land. Mr and Mrs Lambchop correcting everyone's grammar in a crisis. Arthur furious at being left behind again. Stanley wanting a moment to straighten himself out before meeting his public. A little Spanish gets taught along the way, gently, because Carlos keeps translating things.

It moves fast and the chapters are tiny, which makes it a good one for a reader who wants to finish something in a sitting or two.

Two things to flag. There is real bullfighting in it, a bull in a ring with a matador and a crowd, treated as a thrilling spectacle rather than something to question, and a child who minds about animals may not enjoy that. The Mexico here is also a picture-book Mexico of matadors and secret family recipes, which is fun but is not really a place.

What to read next

Stanley in Space is in the library too, for a reader who likes him best when he is going somewhere ridiculous. That one starts with a voice calling out from further away than any planet in any book, and the President of the United States ringing the house.