Water For Elephants
A Novel
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4.3 • 568 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
The runaway international bestseller and beloved fiction classic
Orphaned and penniless at the height of the Depression, Jacob Jankowski escapes everything he knows by jumping on a passing train—and inadvertently runs away with the circus. So begins Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen’s darkly beautiful tale about the characters who inhabit the less-than-greatest show on earth.
Jacob finds a place tending the circus animals, including a seemingly untrainable elephant named Rosie. He also comes to know Marlena, the star of the equestrian act—and wife of August, a charismatic but cruel animal trainer. Caught between his love for Marlena and his need to belong in the crazy family of travelling performers, Jacob is freed only by a murderous secret that will bring the big top down.
Water for Elephants is an enchanting page-turner, the kind of book that creates a world that engulfs you from the first page to the last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With its spotlight on elephants, Gruen's romantic page-turner hinges on the human-animal bonds that drove her debut and its sequel (Riding Lessons and Flying Changes) but without the mass appeal that horses hold. The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression. When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures, including an elephant who only responds to Polish commands. He also falls in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for. Despite her often clich d prose and the predictability of the story's ending, Gruen skillfully humanizes the midgets, drunks, rubes and freaks who populate her book.
Customer Reviews
Water For Elephants
A thought provoking story that makes you wonder how a life full of adventure and love could conclude so pathetically, almost!
Good book!
I couldn't put it down and ended up finishing it in only two days. A great read as I got swept away to go join the circus!
Water for Elephants
I was so engrossed in this book , that my family had to wait for their suppers at times,
Wonderful story, very human and believable
Unlike some stories one hears or reads about.
I will follow this author closely.