5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Delightful Thanksgiving Book, September 30, 2006
This review is from: Turkey Surprise (Hardcover)
My pre-schooler and I both enjoyed this book. It is a lovely holiday book which I expect to be asked to read long after Thanksgiving. Both the text and the illustrations were artfully rendered. I found the surprise that this pilgrim family chose not to eat turkey at their otherwise traditional Thanksgiving dinner to be unique and entertaining. My daughter, a confirmed meat eater from a confirmed meat eating family, thought the ending was fun. I would highly recommend this book.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thanksgiving with a Twist!, June 1, 2009
I dare you not to laugh when reading this book, especially when you look closely at the illustrations featuring the lovable turkey and his animal friends. The rhyming refrain is easy to learn and children love to sing it outloud with the reader. The overall rhythm and pace of the story are spot-on and you'll be cheering for both the little pilgrim and the turkey. It is so nice to see an alternate view of Thanksgiving portrayed in a fresh, inviting, and open-minded way.
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10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Trying to like it despite myself., August 14, 2006
This review is from: Turkey Surprise (Hardcover)
Peggy Archer, Turkey Surprise (Dial Books for Young Readers, 2005)
I've been trying to figure out how to fairly review this book for a couple of weeks now. I always do my best to try and divorce my feelings on the book itself from the feelings of the message contained therein, as long as that message is artfully conveyed. I always thought that I could fairly review books containing even the most offensive messages based on their technical merits. This one has sorely tested that belief. Not just because the underlying message is the kind of thing that drives me up the wall, but because this in one of those rare cases where the book is technically proficient enough to warrant a positive review.
Turkey Surprise is well-written enough that its message doesn't slap the reader in the face with a dead fish (or turkey, as the case may be), but it still gets its point across with no ambiguity whatsoever (Spider Robinson could learn a whole lot from Peggy Archer)-- this is a vegetarian manifesto that attacks Thanksgiving, and it's an important enough point that it's mentioned front and center in the Booklist review that heads up the Amazon page. If you, as a parent, don't have a problem with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, and see no reason why your child should, avoid this book. Its entire purpose is to telegraph the message "turkeys should not be killed for food."
But, as I said, it gets that message across both with technical proficiency (the writing style is well above average-- stratospheric for a "message book," in fact) and nonverbal content (the pictures are witty and charming).
My original rating of the book was, for all intents and purposes, an excoriation, pure and simple. I have since revised it up to "perfectly average" (perhaps "perfectly balanced" would be a better phrase here) to account for the fact that the only thing about the book that bothers me is its message. It may go up again in the future. ** ½
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