Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Category: Novel Grade: A

This book seems to have become a staple of the book club circuit and its pretty easy to see why. It's a well constructed story with a really good ending. I will warn those of you with squeamish stomachs that one of the themes of the book is animal cruelty and, while it' not horribly graphic, it's definitely there.

Gruen has adopted a somewhat unusual structure for the book. The first three chapters cover the middle, end and beginning of the story and everything converges from there. Since this all happens in the first 15 pages or so, I don't feel bad about having a little bit of a spoiler. The bulk of the book takes place at a not-so-great traveling circus. In the opening pages, we get what is really the climax of the book - a murder (sort-of) and a stampede of all the animals in the circus menagerie and, we meet the book's narrator, Jacob Jankowsky. In the second chapter, we jump way ahead to Jankowsky at age 93 in a nursing home. Then in the third chapter, we go all the way to the beginning of the story -- with Jankowsky as a veternary student who learns that his parents have been killed in a car wreck. When he returns to school after the funeral for his finals, he is so distraught that he ends up running out of the exam room and, in desperation, hopping a train that's moving through town. It's only when he wakes up the next morning that he realizes that the train he's jumped belongs to the Benzini Brothers Traveling Circus and so, without really making a decision, Jankowsky becomes a circus-hand.

The book bounces back and forth between Jake in his 20s at the circus and Jake in his 90s at the nursing home. Most of the interesting parts of the story take place at the circus and leads you to the climax that you already know is coming, but didn't quite understand. You get a great view of circus life and the freaks, roustabouts and performers that populate it. You may wonder, during the book, why Gruen bothered to include the "old Jake" story line. It makes for some good comic relief but, in the end, becomes a critical part of the story.

Grit your teeth through the animal-cruelty parts (and know that it all works out for in the end). You'll enjoy this one.