Book report: Water for Elephants

I mentioned that this blog would feature a little bit of a lot of things, and I thought book reviews should be one of them. I do not read, I devour. But I can be a fussy reader. I know that I can only expect to get a good rapture experience every once in a great while, but if a book takes too long to pull me in, I'm likely to dismiss it and move on to something else.

I'm in two book clubs at present, and what with all the hot summer weather and leisurely lay-out sessions in the sun, I've had lots of time to sneak a few of my own picks in recently. So I have lots of recommendations, and they run the gamut from fiction to non, classic to contemporary. But there is one thing you should know about my taste in tomes. My favorite book of all times is To Kill A Mockingbird. I think it is perfection, pure and simple, and my lit-lover mother and I still throw Harper Lee's lines around as if we invented the words. Some people might say my best-loved book is rather generic, as it is the quintessential secondary school required reading across the country, and that its themes are now rather quaint. I would have to disagree. It is classic, poetic, and inherently good. And to steal a line from Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption, no good thing ever dies.

[From here on out, the reviews will be called book reports, in honor of my father, who for a short period of time while my sisters and I were growing up tried to assign weekly out-of-school reading assignments complete with Friday book reports. Looking back, I find this laugh-out-loud hilarious, for I'm sure the goal of making us more worldly creatures was not worth the grief we gave him at the thought of another homework assignment.]

Via

Summary:

Tragedy sends a veterinary student on the cusp of graduation off the rails, and he ends up running away from his Ivy League education to joins the circus. It's the train-traveling kind of big top, and Jacob, the would-be vet, has animal care knowledge that makes him useful to the miserly circus owner, Uncle Al, and head animal trainer, August, who turns out to be a cruel man to all manner of species. A friendship with August seems worth forging, however, because he is married to the lovely star performer. Jacob is smitten from the start, which spells out danger for anyone in August's path.

Opinion:

I read this on a flight to and from New York City for a weekend visit with my best girlfriends, growing up. This novel had just the right amount of fantasy and intrigue to set my mind off of work and onto play. I did get slightly bored at times -- mostly while I was getting to know the supporting characters, who didn't become compelling until well into the book. But then there's Rosie, an enormous elephant who steals the show, both in terms of the circus within the story, and the book itself. I am so far beyond "animal lover" that it's become something of a clinical condition -- I'm sure I'd much prefer the company of most critters to humans -- but you'd have to be awfully grinchy not to be totally taken with Rosie. That presents itself as a problem, unfortunately, because she bears the brunt of more than one of August's rages, and it's truly painful to read. But don't you worry. Rosie gets her poetic justice, in the end. I worried that I wouldn't care much for early 20th century circus fodder, but in the end, the setting and real life-inspired stories were my favorite things about this book.