A cone of yellow light falls across an empty stage. In the middle of it stands a bird drawn entirely in black, a shape with one wide eye, two footlights glowing at his feet and the dim heads of an audience waiting beyond. There are no words on that page. On the next, the light spills over rows of faces, a grandfather in a green cardigan, a boy waving both arms, and the narrator admits his heart is racing. It is the best moment in How to Catch a Turkey by Adam Wallace, and it arrives after a whole school has spent the morning trying to grab him.
How to Catch a Turkey Is Really About Nerves
The premise sounds like slapstick. A school is rehearsing its Thanksgiving play, the teachers announce that a live turkey will appear on stage, and the turkey, who has not been consulted, breaks for the door. What follows is a long pursuit through room after room, with children, a lunch lady wearing a colander as a helmet, and finally the principal in a purple suit carrying a butterfly net.
Underneath, though, this is a book about a performer who does not want to perform. The bird is not running from the oven. Nobody in the story even suggests it. He is running from an audience, and the ending rests on a small private decision rather than on anyone’s cleverness. He takes a breath and tells himself, in one of the book’s simplest lines, “Who knows? This might be fun.” For children facing a first recital or a class assembly, that is a useful sentence to have in their pocket, and parents may find it worth borrowing on the drive to the school hall.
In How to Catch a Turkey by Adam Wallace, the crowd’s reaction is the joke that seals it. A child calls him adorable, and a parent concludes he must be a kid in a mascot suit. It is a neat piece of misdirection, and it turns the bird’s terror into applause without anyone learning the truth.
The Pictures Do the Heavy Lifting
Andy Elkerton’s illustrations have the saturated, rounded look of a feature cartoon, with elastic faces and furniture caught mid-topple. They are full of business that the text never mentions: a science-room plunger launcher, a robot claw, a planet mobile knocked spinning, a white hat lifted from a backstage coat rack that turns up again on the dancing bird. The final dance is staged in two circular frames, like a spotlight seen twice, which gives the climax a pleasing sense of rhythm. On the last stage spread, look for the principal standing in the wings, smiling, with the net tucked behind her back.
The verse is weaker, and it is the main thing holding How to Catch a Turkey by Adam Wallace back from the front rank of holiday picture books. Read aloud, many of the lines have too many syllables for their beat, and an adult will find themselves rushing or stretching words to make the rhymes come out. Young listeners rarely mind, but the reader does, and by the tenth room the identical shape of each stanza starts to drag. Some pages also crowd the text into a corner of a busy scene, which makes a slow reader lose the line. The series made its name on children designing elaborate traps; here the children never build anything, and the title promises a different book from the one delivered.
About That Thanksgiving Play
The holiday supplies the setting and very little else. The school play is the familiar pageant: buckled hats, white bonnets and collars, a painted Plymouth Rock and a cornucopia of fruit. The book uses these as costume and scenery, not as history, and it neither explains nor questions them. Families who want children to hear the Wampanoag side of the story will want a companion title, and Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story by Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry and Alexis Bunten is the obvious partner. Taken on its own terms, How to Catch a Turkey by Adam Wallace is a seasonal comedy, not a lesson, and it is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.
It is also one of the 2018 entries in a series that began two years earlier with a leprechaun. Every title introduces new children and a new creature, so it needs no preparation. The playful nod to real life comes with the cover’s small footnote that no turkeys were harmed, which pairs nicely with the White House custom of pardoning a turkey each November.
A word for sensitive listeners: the book trades in cartoon pratfalls, flying food and a moment of panic, all of it played for laughs and resolved kindly.
The Two Makers Behind How to Catch a Turkey
Adam Wallace is a Melbourne cartoonist and author who describes his aim as getting children to love reading, writing and drawing. Alongside the How to Catch books he has written comic fiction for young readers such as Dad Jokes Are the Worst and the Super Epic Dragon Quest series. The idea for the series itself came from inside the publishing house, when an editor’s daughter was building leprechaun traps at school for St. Patrick’s Day.
Andy Elkerton came to picture books from the video-game industry, where he worked as a lead artist for more than a decade before returning to illustration in the early 2000s. That background shows. He frames a page like a game level, with depth and movement, and the chase scenes in How to Catch a Turkey by Adam Wallace feel animated even when they stand still.
Final Thoughts
Ages four to eight will laugh at the pratfalls and spot things on each rereading, and the reader at the side of the bed will forgive the bumpy verse for the sake of that wordless spotlight page. How to Catch a Turkey by Adam Wallace is a light, warm picture book about courage dressed as a farce, best paired with something that takes the holiday more seriously. Thank You, Omu! by Oge Mora brings a generous shared meal to the same shelf, and Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving suits older siblings who want a longer story. For more on the faces children now find in their books, see how inclusive books are changing children’s literature; Elkerton’s crowded classrooms are a small example.