By Megan McDonald
The shortest boy in second grade wakes up sure he's shrinking, and the chart on the wall seems to back him up.
James Moody goes by Stink. Everybody calls him that, even his own family, and he's the shortest person in his second-grade class. His big sister Judy measures him against the wall every morning. One day the ruler reads three feet, seven and three-quarter inches. The day before he was three feet eight. Stink does the math and panics: he's shrinking. The rest of the week is one desperate scheme after another to get taller, including enough hair gel to turn his hair bright orange. In the middle of all this he finally gets his turn to bring the class newt home for the weekend, which goes about as badly as it possibly could. Then he writes a President's Day report on James Madison, the shortest president the country ever had, and starts to see his own height a little differently.
The type is big, the chapters are short, and Peter Reynolds has a drawing on nearly every spread. Stink also draws his own comic strips right inside the book, so a child who's just started reading alone keeps hitting pages that look like a comic dropped into the middle of a real chapter book. That's a generous trade at this stage. And the story pays them back for finishing it. Stink spends a hundred pages certain that being small is a catastrophe, and the thing that fixes it isn't growing. It's finding out that a short man once ran the country. If your child loves this one, there are more than a dozen more Stink books after it.