The Turners

The Turners (2016) is the first novel in an eponymous series of books by Mick Elliott, an award-winning writer and producer for the TV channel Nickelodeon. Intended for an audience of late-elementary to middle-grade readers, the novel is a funny and action-packed adventure story about a boy who finds out that he and his family have the ability to shape-shift into animals. He must then use these powers to defeat an unpleasant villain and to find and rescue his father. Elliott has geared his novel toward reluctant readers, and it features relatively simple language, an exciting and fast-paced plot, and large doses of scatological humor.

On the day of his thirteenth birthday, Leo Lennox doesn’t have huge plans. All he wants to do is maybe actually get the attention of his crush, Lily, hang out with his best friend, Jinx, or just have a quiet night at home with his older sister, Abbie and their dad, Vernon.

Instead, Leo finds himself having an extremely embarrassing moment in the school library. Out of nowhere, he grows a tail and claws and gets a strange hankering for mice. As he keeps transforming, Leo realizes that he is about to turn into a Komodo Dragon – and that his classmates are starting to seem like tasty snacks.



Leo manages to get the situation under control, and that night, his dad reveals to him the Lennox family secret. Because of a genetic anomaly, they are Turners – people with the ability to shape-shift into almost any animals, ranging from birds to reptiles to mammals. However, as Vernon explains, what has happened to Leo is very unusual. Typically, Turners can only use their power at night, only for a brief period of time, and typically they require a lengthy period of practice and study to get the transformations correct. The fact that Leo was able to turn during the day makes him a very special Turner indeed.

Deciding to investigate Leo’s condition, Vernon leaves the kids on their own. However, when he doesn’t return, it becomes clear that something terrible has happened, and Leo and Abbie embark on a series of complex adventures trying to find him.

Up to this point, eighteen-year-old Abbie has treated her brother with disdain and sarcasm. After all, she is so much older that it feels like they are in different worlds. Now they are forced to work together in ways that are both uncomfortable and unfamiliar. They spend hours crammed into the back seat of a tiny Fiat 500. While Abbie turns into a sloth and is trying to teach Leo that transformation takes skill and concentration – and that when a Turner is an animal, they take on that animal’s instincts and traits – he startles her and gets sprayed with defensively-issued sloth urine. In a thrilling moment, Abbie turns into a bird just in time to rescue Leo as he is falling out of the sky.



Abbie and Leo realize that underneath their sibling squabbles they care about each other very deeply and that they are each willing to risk quite a lot to protect the other.

This knowledge helps them when they come face to face with the terrifying forces that have their father: an ancient shape-shifter that at this point is half-man half-snake, his team of snake-skinned henchmen, and the genetically engineered killer pigs who are his favorite way of disposing of enemies.

The kids prevail in a nail-biting conclusion that many readers point to as the best part of the novel. The series continues in two subsequent books, The Turners: Camp Freakout, in which the secret existence of the Turners is in danger of being revealed when Leo goes to summer camp; and Fully Doomed, in which a mad scientist poses a threat to all the world’s Turners.