Water for Elephants -- Sara Gruen

I don’t read much non-genre fiction, but this novel combines the circus and the Great Depression, two of my current interests, so I decided to give it a chance. I’m glad I did, because it’s a good book.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS is the story of Jacob Jankowski, a young veterinary student at Cornell University who has to leave school when his parents are killed in a car wreck. With no family and no home, Jacob winds up hopping on a passing freight train, only to discover that it’s a circus train carrying the somewhat disreputable Benzini Brothers Greatest Show on Earth. Even though Jacob doesn’t have his veterinary degree, he knows more about animals than anybody else involved with the circus, so he winds up taking care of the menagerie. This puts him in close contact with a beautiful young trick rider, who, unfortunately, is already married to another of the circus performers. Then the circus picks up an elephant from another show that has gone out of business, and that ultimately complicates things even more.

The romantic triangle aspect of this novel gets pretty soap-operatic before it’s over, but Gruen does a good job of not letting it become too over-the-top. Along the way there’s a lot of circus lore and legend and plenty of good characters, like Rosie the elephant and the dwarf clown Walter and his dog Queenie. The story is told in flashback by an elderly Jacob while he’s in a nursing home, and those scenes are pretty poignant. WATER FOR ELEPHANTS had one strike against it going in, because it’s written in present tense, a technique I don’t usually care for. Gruen handled it skillfully enough so that it didn’t bother me, though.

While I felt this novel came up a little short of greatness, it is very good, one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.