Water For Elephants

Another wonderful book - I've just been hitting on some gems recently! :)  Sara Gruen is best known for this one, obviously, but she has a few more books out there.  This is a brazen look at circus life in the 20th century - always touching and usually fairly raunchy, this book is truly decadent.  It starts as all great books should - with a self-proclaimed old codger reliving memories and annoying peers in a nursing home, where he has been dumped by his large family to while away the rest of his days.  [You know it's a fantastic read when you look forward to both the flashbacks and the interspersed portions of reality.]

Jacob Jankowski doesn't mean to have anything to do with the circus.  He's preparing for his final vet exams at Cornell when he learns that his parents have died in a horrible car accident.  In shock, he leaves the exam room - and everything he knows in life - behind, and enters the dark and dangerous world of circus performers.  As the head veterinarian for the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show On Earth, he meets and falls in love with Marlena, a beautiful performer and wife to a very dangerous man.  Jacob sees things he could not have dreamed of, and lives a life one can only live in a train filled with circus animals.

Water For Elephants is one of the rare few books that transports you to the main character's locale - the imagery is so intense that you can't help but feel what Jacob feels and see what he sees.  An excellent read, though very graphic throughout (if it was a movie, which I guess it now is, I'd give it an R rating).

Hungry Lionel gives this:

4.5/5