Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
331 pages
Finished 1/13/07













I'll admit, I had pretty high expectations for this book. Everything that I have read has given this book RAVE reviews. To be quite honest, I probably would have liked it more if 1) I hadn't heard everyone gush about how great it was and 2) I hadn't read Geek Love a couple of months ago (which is seriously one of the best books ever). In the end, while I thought it was a decent book, I really don't think it lives up to the hype.

The book's narrator is a man in his 90s who lives in a nursing home. The story alternates between present time, and the time he joined up with a circus in his early twenties.

Don't get me wrong - I don't think this was a bad book by any means. And for a couple of paragraphs near the end of the book, I was really into it. But for the rest of the book (the whole beginning, and then again at the end), I was just kind of going through the motions while reading it. It held my interest, yes, but I don't think that the book challenged me in any way. It was also a very quick read - I read it easily in a day.

Three stars.