A branch snaps, a rope bites, and a boy in borrowed breeches is suddenly hanging upside down at the edge of a forest, his spectacles somewhere in the leaves below. Forty or fifty settlers come running behind a barking yellow dog. When the boy’s sister greets the colony’s leaders with a delighted exclamation, the whole crowd repeats the strange word back to her, puzzled, one voice after another. Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne finds most of its comedy in exactly this gap between two kinds of English, and most of its feeling in what the gap hides.
The Thursday Mary Pope Osborne Borrowed From 1621
Before the story begins, Osborne writes a short letter admitting that her research surprised her. The gathering children learn about as the first Thanksgiving was, she explains, a three-day harvest festival rather than a day set apart for giving thanks, and the national holiday only arrived in 1863, when Lincoln proclaimed it. It is an honest opening for a book aimed at six- to nine-year-olds, and it tells adults exactly how seriously to take the school-pageant version.
The story itself, though, compresses those three days into a single golden afternoon, and it states as plain fact that the settlers invited Massasoit and his men and then worried they had not cooked enough. The Plimoth Patuxet Museums’ account of the 1621 harvest is more careful, noting that nobody knows for certain why the Wampanoag joined the gathering. Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne was published in 2002, before that more cautious framing reached many classrooms, and it shows. The harvest table here is a scene of untroubled welcome.
A Kitchen, a Fire and an Orphan
The novel’s real subject arrives in its quietest chapter. Soaked from a failed fishing trip, the children are taken in by Priscilla, a weary seventeen- or eighteen-year-old who sets them to stirring pots beside a hearth big enough to stand in. Earlier, Annie has refused to dig for clams once she learns they can live for nearly a century, and the story makes Priscilla’s sad eyes brighten. Then, almost in passing, she explains that the previous winter’s fever took her mother, her father and her brother, and that half the settlement died with them.
Osborne handles this beautifully for the age group. There is no lingering and no lesson, just a silence by the fire and a child putting an arm around a grown woman. It changes how a young reader sees every bustling scene that follows, and it gives the final page its weight. The back matter confirms that the real Priscilla Mullins lost her family in that first winter and later married the cooper John Alden, which makes a satisfying discovery for children who assume the people in the story were invented.
Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne is the twenty-seventh adventure for Jack and Annie and the third of four quests in which the enchantress Morgan le Fay sends them hunting for a particular kind of magic. Here the magic turns out to be community, a word the book repeats until nobody can miss it. The two earlier quests are not required reading, since a single page recaps the tree house and its rules.
What Squanto Remembers
The book’s best moment belongs to the one Native character with a voice. When Jack invents a cover story about sailing to America as a baby with John Smith, the settlers turn to Squanto to confirm it, and he says, quietly, that he remembers. Only on the walk back to the forest does he explain what he meant. He was carried off across the ocean as a captive long ago, and he recognised in the children the fear of being a stranger in someone else’s world. Then he teaches them to plant corn when the oak buds are the size of a mouse’s ear, and Jack copies the instructions into his notebook, which appears on the page as hand-lettered notes.
It is a lovely scene, and a revealing one. A man’s enslavement becomes, in the space of a paragraph, a lesson in kindness for two visiting children, and the closing facts pages are left to explain that his people, the Patuxet, had been wiped out by an epidemic in 1617 while he was away. Massasoit’s ninety men, meanwhile, hunt, eat and beat drums offstage. Readers today will notice how much of the Wampanoag story is left to the appendix, and adults sharing Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne should be ready to fill in what follows the feast. The book’s themes of loss, captivity and bereavement are handled with restraint, and nothing here should trouble a young listener.
Why the Formula Still Works
For all that, the series’ formula earns its reputation. The chapters are short, the sentences plain, and every few pages a puzzle, a joke or a small disaster keeps a reluctant reader turning. Jack’s anxious cover story and Annie’s cheerful honesty make an old double act that still works, and the strange colonial speech gives the dialogue a running game children enjoy decoding aloud. Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne also leaves its readers with something practical: a planting method, a few period words, and the idea that gratitude means more from people who have recently lost a great deal.
The weaknesses are the ones the series always has. Characters are sketched rather than drawn, the plot depends on accidents, and the wider community stays at a distance. For a family that wants the 1621 story from the other side of the table, it works best as one half of a pair.
Mary Pope Osborne and the Artist Beside Her
The author of Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne came to children’s books by a winding route. After college she travelled overland through Asia with a small group of strangers, until blood poisoning put her in a hospital bed, where she read The Lord of the Rings. Her first book, Run, Run As Fast As You Can, appeared in 1982, and she has since served two terms as president of the Authors Guild. She has said that Annie began as a stock pesky little sister and grew into a co-star once she started writing her, and the bold, impulsive girl here shows why.
The pictures are by Sal Murdocca, born in 1943 and raised in Brooklyn, who studied illustration at the city’s High School of Art and Design and spent years in advertising and magazine work before turning to children’s books. His soft grey drawings of thatched roofs and autumn woods have defined how a generation imagines this series.
What It Leaves Behind
For a matching holiday story about children running the kitchen themselves, An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott reads aloud just as well. The Wampanoag picture book Keepunumuk, written by Danielle Greendeer with Anthony Perry and Alexis Bunten, tells the same harvest through Wampanoag voices and makes the natural companion, part of the shift traced in how inclusive books are changing children’s literature. Readers who outgrow the tree house will find the next step in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.
Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne ends in a Pennsylvania wood with two children promising each other to be thankful, and meaning it. The history on the way there is softened, but the grief is real, and that is the part a young reader will carry home.