Drawn from life, Arthur Geisert’s Pumpkin Island is the fantastical story of a real life town brought to a halt by a profusion of pumpkins. Elkader, Iowa, is the perfect picture of small town life—that is, until the pumpkins arrive. One pumpkin? Fine. Two pumpkins? Okay. But with pumpkins growing around every street corner, and over every building, what’s a town to do? In these pages, Geisert imagines the town of Elkader overrun by the pumpkins that grow on Pumpkin Island, which sits in the Turkey River, right outside his kitchen window.