Sara Gruen - Water For Elephants

It is very rare indeed that I read a book with raised lettering on the cover, but I found myself recently with a copy of Sara Gruen’s novel Water For Elephants, which I found to be a well-paced, well-researched, very enjoyable read.

The story follows Jacob, a young Ivy League student who goes in one chapter from sitting for final exams to shoveling shit on a third-rate train circus in Depression-era America, surrounded by the requisite cast of midget clowns, bearded ladies, toothless lions, drunken roustabouts, overbearing bosses, and an elephant that only understands Polish. Water For Elephants is ultimately a story about all the familiar themes: finding your place in the world, finding love and trust in unexpected places, and discovering that life has a funny way of working out in the end.

That’s all I can really say without ruining the plot, so I save my real accolades for Sara Gruen herself. After years of making a living as a technical writer (hence, perhaps, the sparseness of detail), she decided to retire early and write fiction for a living (NOT an easy thing to do emotionally or financially). She meticulously researched the world of train circuses during the Great Depression and did a fantastic job of weaving in history (or at least potentially-true anecdotes) into a world of pure fiction.

Water For Elephants is not the tome of literary fiction that I would normally enjoy— a book that works on a hundred different levels, which is packed full of precise and minute detail, which rewards readers the second and third and fourth times through. In fact, I am confident I will never be tempted to glance at this book again, but that one reading was very enjoyable. There is not much going on behind the prose, but there is still plenty to satisfy. The setting doesn’t pop as much as one might expect, but the characters are very lively, especially the animals. The climax is well written, the twist is actually surprising, and the framing device not used too obnoxiously.

There could have been more to it, yes, but the fact is: being dissatisfied because you want more is far, far better than being dissatisfied because there is way too much.

Ahem, The Kite Runner, I am looking in your direction.