This is a MUST read
I LOVED this book. It gets going from page 1, it's an easy read and I just couldn't put it down. There was nothing I didn't like. The story line is unusual. It's well written and you get a good sense of things without long, boring descriptions of characters and places. I would recommend this book to anyone who is as harsh a critic as I am and only enjoys books that are engaging, fast reads that leave you wanting for more.
This left me cheering
It's not often that a book leaves me cheering out loud, but WATER FOR ELEPHANTS did just that.
Packed with delightfully-unfolded information about depression-era circuses, this book is more than a history of the big top and most definitely more than a mere boy-meets-girl story.
For a young man, the glamor of running away to join a circus isn't really all that glamourous after all. Gruen shows the seedy side of the big top, the desperate times of the depression, the multilayered personalities of performers, roustabouts, owners, and even the animals, and balances it all delicately with the memories of an old man in an assisted living facility.
I loved the way the title tied in to the story. No one, apparently, carries water for elephants, since elephants drink far too much. But in our memories - perhaps we all believe we have carried water for our own private elephants.
I admit I read it twice in a week - inhaling it the first time, savoring it the second (particularly the ending). Tasty indeed, and five-star all the way.
the life of a circus
"Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen, © 2006
Ms. Gruen writes an odd story. It is really two stories in one. The main one is of an almost veterinarian, Jacob Jankowski, who becomes caught up in the life of a circus. It is a romance: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back (whoopee). In the afterword the author explains that she was wanting to do a story about the photographer of circus', but she got caught up in all the rest of the circus history and it became this book. It is worthy and good. The second is of the same man in a nursing home, or some such place, who sort of does not belong there. He has lived his life and remembers it well. The instigation is the circus has come to town!!
The chapters are defined by when is the story being told. Sometimes it is now: he is old and ornery; the next one, he is remembering his life in the circus. The value is in the perspective: as an old man, he has problems, but he deals with them, somewhat; as a young man he grows up and finds the love of his life. It is always wonderful to read a story of love growing and becoming the be all to end all. But real love is of the animals, horses, elephants, orangutans, chimpanzees and doing something constructive. In the end you feel that everything is wonderful and has come out all right.
The odd thing, like in some other places I have seen ("Passenger 54"), the title comes from out of the blue, once, and it is never explained or spoken of again.
