Book Review: Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Review from Amazon.com

Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena's and Rosie's pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it--and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely.

My Review:

Everything that I could say about this book has basically been said in the review above, which I think was quite well done. I did really enjoy this book, although parts of it actually really turned my stomach. There were also some very funny parts though, and a very interesting and page-turning storyline. I also enjoyed reading the back section of this book on how Sara Gruen gathered her inspiration to write this book.

So I would say that I would definitely recommend this book, I think it was well-written and fast-moving. Sara Gruen did some great research before writing this book, and I think that a lot of it is quite factual and even more interesting because parts of it are based on true stories!

As always, let me know if you have read this book, and what you thought about it, or if you decide to pick it up and read it!

One more thing...

Has anyone here read the the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand? Geez, I am trying to get into this thing. It was chosen by my book club as our "Big One" (it is a little over a thousand pages, and quite literally in about size 7 font). I am having quite a problem getting into the book and was hoping if someone could tell me if it gets more fast-paced.