The African Safari Discovery by Jeff Brown and Josh Greenhut is a very silly Flat Stanley travel adventure for 8 year olds, starring a boy who is half an inch thick.<\/p>\n
Stanley Lambchop is flattened against the wall outside the kitchen, listening to his mum worry that he might stay flat for the rest of his life. Somebody at school called him Boardbrains yesterday. He goes and lies under the sofa, which he can do, because he is flat.<\/p>\n
Then the neighbour arrives with a newspaper. Scientists have dug up a flat skull in Tanzania.<\/p>\n
Stanley wants to go. Not for the adventure. He wants to know whether there has ever been anyone else like him.<\/p>\n
The museum will pay for two plane tickets, so Stanley offers to fold himself into the seat pocket and let his dad and his little brother Arthur have the seats. The flight attendant is having none of it, and he spends the whole flight in the baggage hold with a terrified poodle and some golf clubs.<\/p>\n
This is the sixth of Stanley’s worldwide adventures and it moves fast. A police pilot points out Kilimanjaro. There’s a brushfire back at the park, so the boys have to leave the plane mid air, and there are only two parachutes. Stanley reckons he can be his own.<\/p>\n
Being flat then saves him twice in about a minute, once from the ground and once from a lion.<\/p>\n
What your reader will actually laugh at is the family. Mrs Lambchop cares deeply about grammar and will correct her husband in the middle of a crisis (Stanley has not “gone” flat, he has “become” flat). Arthur is a champion whinger about mud in his socks. Their dad gets two boys, a borrowed canoe and no paddle, and turns it into a lesson about where the saying comes from.<\/p>\n
One thing that dates it. The book treats a whole continent as one destination, so the family pack their bags for Africa the way you might pack for Spain. The Masai man they meet on the riverbank is the one who gets the last laugh about that, which helps, but the shorthand is there and an older reader may notice it.<\/p>\n
Underneath the jokes there’s a real question, which is whether Stanley would rather be ordinary. That’s the bit that will land.<\/p>\n
To go back to where all this started, try the book where Flat Stanley began. It’s the morning the enormous bulletin board falls on him in the night and his brother yells the news to the whole house.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The African Safari Discovery by Jeff Brown and Josh Greenhut is a very silly Flat Stanley travel adventure for 8 year olds, starring a boy who is half an inch thick. Stanley Lambchop is flattened against the wall outside the kitchen, listening to his mum worry that he might stay flat for the rest of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10129,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":7437,"lr_next_read_anchor":"the book where Flat Stanley began","lr_seo_hook":"Half an inch thick, and flying to Tanzania to find someone else like him."},"book_tag":[1045],"age_group":[26],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[446,1145],"class_list":["post-8796","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-adventure-books","age_group-books-for-8-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-jeff-brown","book_author-josh-greenhut"],"yoast_title":"The African Safari Discovery by Jeff Brown & Josh Greenhut | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Half an inch thick, and flying to Tanzania to find someone else like him. For ages 8+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n