On the fourth page of the book, the reader is told that Smelly’s breath reeks of mildew the reader is invited to scratch and sniff. The only problem is that some of the ingredients smell truly, genuinely awful. My copy from kindergarten has optimistic scratch marks on just about everything. All of the ingredients Smelly needs can be scratched and sniffed, and if you don’t spot the ingredient straight away, you can try scratching anywhere on the page. (She’d also quite like to win the prize for Best-Dressed Witch, but that’s a secondary concern to getting her broom back in the air.) The child reader is implicitly invited to quest along with her, trying to identify which ingredient Smelly will add to her belt next. As she makes her way home on foot, Smelly must find all of the ingredients required to brew a broomstick-restoring spell. On the night before the witches’ fancy-dress ball, Smelly’s broomstick runs out of power, sending her tumbling through the roof of an old barn. Smelly Chantelly is a scratch-and-sniff adventure, and Smelly’s foraged ingredients are pungently apparent on every page. The main character is a slob.Īnd, to avoid burying the lead any longer: the book literally stinks.
However, more than twenty years later, Smelly Chantelly remains one of the weirdest picture books I have ever read. My dad bought it for me at my kindergarten book fair, way back in 1996 even then, I was intrigued (and frightened) by the witch on the cover.
Smelly Chantelly isn’t the most famous of witchy books.
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