Turkey Surprise

Peggy Archer

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.