Review – Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

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 thoughts –

Hands down, one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  I was utterly captivated by this story, by Jacob’s story, by the amazing animals, especially Rosie the elephant, the crazy Uncle Al and the even crazier August, and the enchanting Marlena.  This is obviously a story about a circus in the midst of the Depression, but it’s more a story of a young man’s coming into his own, a young woman scraping for her independence, and the absolute and total love and loyalty an animal can show for a human being, and vice versa.  Parts of this book were difficult for me to take in, I have a VERY difficult time reading about animal cruelty, and Gruen spared nothing in her descriptions of how some of these animals were treated.  But at the same time, those descriptions were important to the story because they made the whole thing that much more realistic.  Of course I know nothing about circuis life, or the 1930’s, but I truly felt like Jacob was a real person, narrating his real memoir of his life as a young man. 

And the ending… man, what an ending.  This novel tied up so neatly I almost couldn’t believe it… but it was so beautiful that I could, because I wanted so badly for things to turn out right.  I strongly recommend reading this book, it will captivate you as it did me, you will fly through it, and you will be glad you met Jacob and heard his story, because it is such an amazing one.

10 big, bright yellow stars.

Read Trish’s review here, Julie’s review here, Jeane’s review here, Care’s review here, Kristen’s review here, Natasha’s review here, Di’s review here, and Jaimie’s review here.