the month of June

I finished reading Water for Elephants (or, as I call it in my head, Like Water for Elephants — its namesake clearly being Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate). I’ve mentioned that it was an odd reading experience for me because I felt like I was reading a draft of a piece of fiction written for an advanced creative writing class/workshop. The writing was inconsistent — at times a beautiful sentence peeks out, and I would get all excited by it, but that was always surrounded by a series of overly simplistic sentences. The characterization was odd. The character who was most believable to me was Walter/Kinko the midget with the Jack Russell Terrier, Daisy; however, even he seemed to be a caricature of a small person traveling with a circus. The protagonist was flat in his almost-too-good-to-be-true personality. When the book opens he is ninety or ninety-three (he’s never sure of his exact age), and the dialogue is trite. I found myself asking, is this really how an old man speaks, or is it just how we (and Gruen) think an old man is supposed tospeak? He just wasn’t believable. All my complaints about spotty writing and flat characterization aside, I loved the story and found myself excited to get back to reading it each night. I’m not sure if this is simply because I was so craving a story filled with the details of circus life, and this one gave me the nitty-gritty I was looking for, or it is because Gruen does manage to keep enough happening that an otherwise done-before romance becomes a page-turner. There were moments when I found myself wondering how or why the story was compelling. After all, it is mostly the story of two people in love who can’t be together because one of them is already taken. Nothing new here. Still, there are enough of the circus-driven antics and incidents to keep the story exciting. And the animals. It seems as though Gruen understands animals better than humans, because she was able to bring them to life in ways she just couldn’t with the human characters. Perhaps this is because animals don’t talk and Gruen struggles with dialogue, but whatever the case, the depictions of the animals add an element to the romance that I’ve certainly never encountered in other books I’ve read.