Tornado

Tornado is a middle-grade novel by Betsy Byars, published in 1996. Byars was a prolific author of fiction for children, known for incorporating emotional themes into engaging stories for young readers. She wrote over 65 books over a long career, several of which include narratives about animals. Tornado won the Sunshine State Young Readers Award, Texas Bluebonnet Award, and South Carolina Children’s Book Award. It is a realistic narrative about life in Tornado Alley in the Central United States and includes themes of Resilience in the Face of Natural Disasters, The Power of Human-Animal Bonds, and Stories as Sources of Comfort and Connection.

This guide refers to the 2020 Harper revised paperback edition, which includes illustrations by Doron Ben-Ami.

Plot Summary

On a rural farm, Pete, a farmhand, yells “Twister!” to warn the family about an approaching tornado. Pete helps the narrator, their two brothers, and a grandmother into the cellar. The narrator’s father, Link, is out in the cornfield. His mother, Betsy, yells for Link, but he is unable to hear her. At Pete’s urging, she follows the rest of the family into the cellar. Seeing their worry, Pete begins a story about his childhood dog, Tornado. While there are very brief returns to the present time in the storm cellar, until the final chapter, the majority of the novel takes place in the past: through Pete’s narrated memories.

Pete remembers the day he met Tornado, during a tornado on an August day similar to the one in the present. His mother had “smelled” a tornado, and while the family eats, it rips the roof off their house but leaves the food on the table and the family members in their seats. After checking that they are uninjured, the family goes outside to assess the damage and finds a doghouse with a big, black dog inside. The dog is terrified and refuses to come out of the doghouse until he hears the word “supper,” called by Pete’s mother later in the day. Pete asks his father if they can keep the dog and name it Tornado and is told that he can if they are unable to find its rightful owner.

Pete remembers playing cards with his brother, Sammy, when Tornado comes up to him and nudges his leg. He wonders if Tornado wants to play cards and fans them out in front of the dog. Tornado selects the three hearts and then drops them. Pete tells his father that Tornado knows “half a card trick” (17), and his father helps with instructing the dog to drop the card on command. Pete is proud of Tornado’s card trick.

He also recalls a time when his sister, Emma Lou, was watching a classmate’s turtle, and it went missing. She accuses her brothers of taking it, but Pete sees the turtle in Tornado’s mouth. When Pete instructs Tornado to drop the turtle, he does and then takes off running frantically around the yard. Pete realizes that Tornado was attempting to protect the turtle and that it was very difficult for him to stay still for that time. He is proud of the dog.

Pete then tells the story of the family’s cat, Five-Thirty, which arrived at their farm at suppertime every day until Emma Lou decided to take ownership of it. Tornado had dug a special hole in a wooded area for the purpose of lying down in it to cool off. One day, Five-Thirty gets into the hole and refuses to get out until suppertime. When the cat leaves the hole, Tornado begins to dig deeper, trying to remove signs of the cat. Pete’s mother tells him to fill the hole in, and he does, thinking that Tornado will never be able to fully remove the memory of the cat from his special place anyway.

One day, Pete and his father go into town to visit the hardware store. When they return to Tornado waiting in the truck bed, they find a family grouped around it and a little girl hugging Tornado and addressing the dog as “Buddy.” They explain that they lost the dog in the August tornado. Pete is heartbroken, but he and his father allow the dog to return home with his rightful owners. Pete remains despondent. Almost a week later, Pete is in the barn and thinks he must be imagining the sound of Tornado’s tail thumping against the door. To his delight, it really is Tornado. Pete says that they never took the dog into town again and didn’t have the name or address of the other family, so Tornado stayed with the family for seven happy years.

The storm ends, and the narrator’s father returns unharmed. One of the narrator’s brothers mentions a story about Tornado that Pete did not tell, and Pete promises that he will do so the next time.