Customer Reviews

Turkey Surprise

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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

For a household like vegetarian family, TURKEY SURPRISE will be a delightful read that contains a happy ending for a turkey. Two sibling pilgrims set out to find a turkey for their Thanksgiving feast, but the young one has a different opinion about catching the big bird. Along the way, animals help the wild turkey escape in all sorts of humorous hideouts and though the young pilgrim keeps spotting the turkey, he is able to successfully preventing his big brother from seeing it. Their trail meanders through the tree, the gopher hole, the pond and finally the young pilgrim helps the turkey find a safe woodpile to hide behind while he persuades his brother that their parents would agree that a heavy pumpkin plus all the yummy food is a Thanksgiving dinner just as great. I find it to be a lovely book that embraces diverse celebration of Thanksgiving with a subtle lesson on tolerance.

Two pilgrim brothers go around town and look for a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner in "Turkey Surprise". The little pilgrim brother isn't sure about plucking, stuffing and cooking a turkey. As they are searching, a turkey walks along the road and realizes that the pilgrim brothers want to pluck and stuff him. The turkey tries to find a hiding place but none of the places that he goes (up a tree, a gopher hole, in the water) can effectively hide the turkey. The little pilgrim brother spots the turkey and finds a good hiding place for him and convinces his big brother to bring something else to Thanksgiving dinner.

Some parts of the story are repetitive, making it suitable for beginning readers. The story itself was not interesting enough to sustain my childrens attentions. When little pilgrim asks if a turkey is necessary to have at Thanksgiving, his brother's only explanations were that "Mother and Father want one". A more acceptable analogy would have been to explain the significance of having turkeys at Thanksgiving, perhaps even the origin of when the first turkey was served at Thanksgiving.

Two of the main characters, the turkey and the little pilgrim, appeared ignorant and awkward. The turkey realized that he couldn't swim AFTER he almost drowned. Did the little pilgrim really see the turkey all of those times that he was looking through his spyglass? The evidence suggests that he did know and, in fact, did manage to protect the turkey from becoming a part of the family's Thanksgiving feast.

What could have been a heroic tale of a pilgrim who saved the life of an animal merely ended up as a truly ridiculous turkey tale.