Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen

350 pages

I’m about five years late to the party on this one.  Water for Elephants was a Columbia One Read selection while I worked at DBRL, and it has been on my list of books to read ever since. 

Most people know this is a story of love found on the road with a circus in 1931.  Jacob joins the Benzini Brothers after hearing of the deaths of his parents, and finds a place on the circus train, his studies as a veterinarian-in-training coming to use as he tends the animals.  He falls for Marlena, one of the star performers of the show and wife to one of the cruel circus bosses.

My favorite portions of the books were set with the elderly Jacob, who recounts his story from a nursing home…as much as the life on a Depression-era circus train were interesting, I felt like Gruen saved her textual gems for Jacob’s wry descriptions of what it’s like to be among the elderly - how foreign loose skin feels, how betrayed you feel by your body, how old passions can reignite you.