Water for Elephants
By: Sara Gruen
A thirsty elephant
Oh, Water for Elephants… America loves you. America loves you so much that Hollywood is making a movie about you starring Reese and Rob (swoon!). So why can’t I love you too?
Probably because you had so much potential and didn’t live up to it. I will admit, my expectations were a little high, given how much hype has surrounded this book, but I guess it was foolish of me to assume that if a lot of people are loving a book then I would too. Overall, my reaction was just… meh.
I picked up Water for Elephants because:
- Like I said, other people are really digging this book
- I was in the mood for a really good love story
- The setting – a traveling circus – is great
Water for Elephants only really lived up to number three. As I mentioned above, the book didn’t really live up to the hype for me. And the love story was just okay. It wasn’t particularly passionate or compelling – I would call it “love story lite”. I would actually describe the whole book as “lite”. It ended exactly how I expected to end. There were no twists, nothing unexpected, and it just didn’t have much depth. Which is really disappointing because the setting was great. A circus, traveling through the U.S. by train, during the Great Depression, with hundreds of employees and a whole menagerie of animals, including the titular elephant, provides so much potential for an interesting story. Unfortunately, the author didn’t put this great source material to the best use.
Don’t get me wrong – I finished the book and finished it pretty quickly. It was a fast read and there were some good characters, but I just wanted more. More detail, more passion, more depth. Water for Elephants just didn’t go far enough for me.
In a nutshell: Just okay. Water for Elephants would make a decent beach read, but it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. Two and a half stars.
And because I love to comment on the casting of movies I haven’t seen based on books I’ve already read – I ain’t buying Robert Pattinson as a red-headed Polska. Nice try studio execs.
Postscript 