How to Catch a Leprechaun by Adam Wallace

Hey, Story Seekers!

There are two ways to spend St. Patrick's Day.

You can wear green.

Or you can turn your house into a series of homemade traps designed to capture a tiny magical troublemaker who has apparently spent centuries preparing for exactly this situation.

I know which one sounds more fun.

Today we're exploring How to Catch a Leprechaun, words by Adam Wallace, pictures by Andy Elkerton.

Readit has gone straight to the important question.

"Do they actually catch him?"

Readit.

"That's literally the title."

Hold that thought. You've accidentally put your finger on the single thing readers argue about most with this book.

Book Breakdown

Look at the cover for a second.

He's already leaving.

Half of him is off the edge of the page, mid-sprint, before you've opened the book. That's the whole story right there, and it's a fair warning about what you're in for.

The setup is beautifully simple.

It's St. Patrick's Day. A leprechaun is working his way from house to house. The kids know he's coming.

So they build traps.

He escapes them.

All of them.

And he narrates the entire thing himself, with the easy confidence of somebody who has seen this nonsense many times before.

The rhyme sets the tone on the first page:

How to catch a leprechaun?
It's tougher than you think!
He'll turn your whole house upside down.
He's quicker than a wink!

From there it's a machine.

Trap.

Escape.

Next trap.

Escape.

There isn't much character development, and that isn't the job. This is a setup-and-payoff engine, and the traps get more elaborate as the book goes.

He also makes an enormous mess on his way through. He dyes the toilets green. He deals with a pile of smelly shoes in a way that delighted at least one reviewer's kid.

This is where Andy Elkerton earns his half of the cover.

The pictures aren't a leprechaun standing politely beside a contraption. The traps are built things, with parts and bait and trip mechanisms and, crucially, an escape route you can find if you look hard enough.

That's a real difference. Kids don't just look at these pages.

They inspect them.

And then there's the ending, which is the smartest decision in the book.

Wallace doesn't resolve it. He hands it to the reader:

You'll never catch this Leprechaun. Impossible! That's a fact!
Unless, one day, a brilliant child designs the perfect trap!
Who will this child be?

The book ends by looking your kid in the eye and daring them.

A teacher on Goodreads described reading it to her class and having them finish it shouting, in her words, "MEEEE I CAN DO IT!!!!!!"

That's not an accident. That's the design.

For teachers and librarians: ATOS 1.9 · 303 words · AR Quiz 184982 · 0.5 points. Sourcebooks, February 2, 2016. Thirty-two pages, ages 4 to 10, PreK through grade 4.

No Lexile here on purpose. Current sources disagree badly on this one, listing it as both 500L and AD270L, and I'd rather give you nothing than give you a number that's wrong.

This is the book that launched the How to Catch series, which now runs to roughly forty titles. Adam Wallace is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author on the strength of it.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Here's what I like about this one.

It hands kids a problem they immediately want to solve.

Nobody has to announce, "Today, children, we are going to explore engineering."

Please don't.

Just tell them a leprechaun is coming and their trap isn't going to work.

Now you have their attention.

I'd close this book and immediately ask the one question it's begging for.

What would your trap look like?

Then get out of the way.

Because once a kid starts thinking about where the bait goes, what triggers the thing, how he might slip out, what has to fall or swing or snap or close, they're designing.

And if their first idea has a gigantic hole in it?

Better.

The leprechaun escaped. Fix it.

That's iteration, and it arrived without a worksheet.

The read-aloud is easy too. Wallace gives the leprechaun a braggy little voice, and that's exactly how I'd play him.

Not spooky.

Not mysterious.

Smug.

This fellow knows your cereal-box trap isn't catching him and he wants you to know he knows.

The repetition works in your favor here. After two or three houses, kids stop wondering whether a trap will show up and start wondering how he's going to beat this one. That's anticipation, and it's doing the work that a plot would do in a different book.

Now the honest part.

If you want a picture book with a big emotional turn, or a character your kid is still thinking about at bedtime, this isn't it. Nobody grows. Nobody learns anything. The leprechaun is exactly as smug on the last page as the first.

The engine is the chase, and the traps are the attraction.

I think the book knows that about itself, which is why I don't hold it against it.

It isn't saying "come meet this unforgettable leprechaun."

It's saying "you think you can catch me?"

Oh.

Now it's personal.

Readit's Review

I would not use the first trap.

Too easy.

Also, why would you build a trap and then LEAVE?

I would hide nearby.

With snacks.

And binoculars.

And a second trap behind the first trap, so when he escapes Trap One he runs directly into Trap Two.

Unless he reads this review.

Jimmy, delete that part.

Also he paints the toilet green.

Why?

He's a leprechaun. He could hide gold. He could make coins appear. He could do actual magic.

Nope.

Green toilet.

I respect it.

What Others Think

Goodreads has it at 3.84 out of 5 from 3,108 ratings and 214 reviews, and the spread underneath that average is worth seeing, because it's the most divided book we've covered.

Thirty-eight percent gave it five stars. Eleven percent gave it one or two.

Here's what the enthusiasts say. Calista: "The art is bright and vibrant. It jumps off the page at you." She read it with children and reports they "laughed their way through it."

Autumn read it with two kids of different ages and found they used it differently, which rings true: the three-year-old hunted for the leprechaun on each page, while the older one couldn't get over the traps themselves.

Teachers are where this book really earns its keep. Michelle Farella gets it down to four words: "STEAM combined with Saint Patrick's Day. Love it!" Andrew points at the same thing from another angle, calling it a natural for "rube Goldberg and inventor types."

Ana LibrariAna, a librarian, is specific about the sweet spot: an "ideal St. Patrick's Day read-aloud for preschool to Grade 1, especially if they are about to design or test their leprechaun traps."

Now the complaint, and it's the same complaint over and over from people who otherwise liked it.

The title.

Calista: "This book needs to be renamed to How not to catch a Leprechaun. Nothing they did worked."

Ana LibrariAna, independently: "This book should be called How Not to Catch a Leprechaun."

Lara: "The title is a little misleading. They never do catch the leprechaun."

And Bonnie reports it coming from the only critic who really counts: "My son said the title is misleading because they don't tell how to catch the leprechaun."

So Readit asked the right question in the first thirty seconds, and so does roughly every kid who picks it up.

The real dissent is milder than you'd expect, and it's mostly about ceiling rather than floor. Lara again, and this is the fairest line anybody wrote about the book: "Not exceptional or truly classic, but for a younger audience at a St. Patrick's Day storytime, this fits the bill."

Aneesa was blunter: "Not worth the library hold wait list."

That's a reasonable range for what this is.

Belly Laugh Scale

3 out of 5: Solid Chuckles

This isn't a book I'd pick expecting a room of children to come apart.

The humor is lighter than that. The leprechaun's confidence is funny. The failed traps are funny. The mess is funny, and a green toilet comes to the table with certain natural advantages.

But what actually powers this book is anticipation and participation, not punch lines.

Kids get invested because they want somebody, anybody, to finally beat the little guy.

Then he's gone again.

Three out of five. Solid Chuckles.

And a very high separate score for "book most likely to cause cardboard to vanish from your recycling bin."

Final Explorer Verdict

Ages 4 to 8 is the strike zone, and it's best in a classroom, a storytime, or a family that likes doing something once the reading stops.

It's quick. The rhyme keeps moving. Elkerton gives the traps enough visual business to reward a kid who studies them.

And Wallace ends by handing children a challenge without ever making the book feel like an assignment.

That's the real win here, and it's why I'd forgive the thin plot.

Read it.

Study the traps.

Then ask the dangerous question.

Can you build a better one?

Suddenly there's cardboard on the floor. Tape everywhere. A laundry basket has gone missing. Somebody needs string. Nobody can find the scissors.

Learning has occurred.

Probably.

One scheduling note, because this is a holiday book and holiday books have a window: it lands hardest in the two or three weeks before March 17. Buy it in February if you want the trap-building to actually happen.

There's a bridge to my own shelf here that fits better than most. My book Fort Night is about a kid named Hugo who wants to build the ultimate blanket fort, and it keeps falling down. Same engine: build it, watch it fail, work out why, try again. One book has kids designing a trap. Mine has them designing a fort. Both run on the glorious likelihood that Version One collapses.

Readit?

"My trap is finished."

Already?

"Yep."

What's the bait?

"Gold."

Okay.

"And cookies."

Why cookies?

"I got hungry while building it."

Whose trap is this again?

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit