In a dark corner of the barn, beside a pitchfork and a bucket of feed labelled Turkey Chow, a bird stands in front of a gilt-framed mirror with a red rubber glove pulled down over his head. The fingers flop upward like a comb. He looks, he decides, quite a lot like a rooster. It is the fifth disguise he has tried, and Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano has spent the previous pages teaching its listeners exactly why it will not be the last. The joke is always the same and always fresh: a terrified turkey, a deadline, and a farmyard full of critics who see straight through him.
Turkey Trouble Turns on One Small Word
Silvano’s text is short, perhaps six hundred words, and nearly all of its comedy hangs on a single adverb. Each new costume is judged by the narrator to be pretty good, a convincing likeness, and then comes the pause and the word “almost”. Young children learn to hear that word coming the way they learn the last line of a nursery rhyme, and the book is built so that they can shout it. Teachers who use Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano in a preschool or kindergarten circle tend to stop before each page turn and ask which animal comes next, because the story hands over its clues: whoever exposes Turkey becomes his next model.
The other animals are wonderfully rude about it. The sheep, faced with a bird wearing fleece, bleats “Quit being a ham, Turkey,” and the pig greets an earlier attempt with an exclamation borrowed from the cows. These are puns pitched over the heads of the target audience and straight at the parent, which keeps the twentieth reading bearable.
There is no calendar in the book, and no family history of the holiday. Thanksgiving works purely as a ticking clock. When the farmer’s wife frets about a Thanksgiving with no bird to serve, the stakes become plain, and the answer arrives from the vegetable garden in a way that the youngest listeners will find hilarious and the older ones will want to argue about.
The Pictures Know More Than the Words
The watercolor illustrations Lee Harper painted for Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano carry a good deal of story that the text never mentions. The book opens on wordless pages: the farmer on all fours, his son crouched beside him, peering through a gap in the barn boards, then the turkey bolting across the barn floor past a lone pumpkin. Before Silvano writes a sentence, a child already knows who is hunting whom.
The animals are the triumph here. Harper paints them with enormous rolling eyes and rows of square, slightly too human teeth. A palomino horse throws back its head and guffaws at the turkey’s first effort. The cows crowd into close-up with the weary disdain of seasoned theatre critics. A mud-caked pig sits gnawing an apple core, perfectly content, while a forlorn bird lies beside it. And the sheep, lined up in a row of long, unimpressed faces, deliver the funniest silent reaction in the book.
Harper also uses light to steer mood. The farmyard scenes sit under pale, washed-out skies, open and safe. The barn interiors go almost black, with hay glowing amber, and the suspense pages darken accordingly. Near the end the action moves into a kitchen garden, complete with hand-lettered wooden signs naming each crop, and the bright reds and greens there feel like a deliberate change of key.
His people are less successful. Farmer Jake and his family are drawn long and thin, with narrow faces and spindly arms, and they lack the animals’ warmth. It matters, because the most uncomfortable moment in Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano belongs to the farmer: an offhand remark that another bird could fill the empty dish. It is the only real flash of menace in the story, and the book hurries past it rather than resolving it, which leaves a few sensitive listeners anxious about a character the plot then forgets.
The other reservation is structural. The four middle rounds use nearly identical sentences, and for listeners over six the pattern starts to feel like filler rather than fun. The finale is a clever piece of misdirection, but it depends on not asking practical questions, and some children will ask them.
Wendi Silvano, Lee Harper and One Nervous Bird
Wendi Silvano is a mother of five who lives and writes near the red sandstone canyons of western Colorado, and her author biography notes that this book was named an International Reading Association Children’s Choices pick. Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano came out in 2009 and was popular enough to grow into a holiday series: later books send the same bird after Santa’s sleigh, into Halloween and even off to school, each with a fresh round of disguises.
Lee Harper lives and paints in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Snow! Snow! And snow! was the first picture book he both wrote and illustrated, and he has stayed with the turkey through most of the sequels. His dedication here goes to his own family, which may explain why the closing pages feel so fond of a household sitting down together.
Where It Leaves You
For readers aged roughly three to six, this is a dependable November choice: brisk, noisy and generous with jokes in the margins. It does not attempt to teach the holiday’s history, and it should not be asked to. Pair it with How to Catch a Turkey by Adam Wallace for another escape-artist bird, or with Mo Willems’s Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! for a similarly desperate hero arguing with the reader. Older children who are ready for a longer story can graduate to An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott, and the adults, once bedtime is done, might settle in with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, a family meal of a very different kind.
Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano ends with a table full of happy faces and one bird who has outwitted everyone. On the evidence of the farmyard, he had plenty of practice.