Historical fiction rarely ends up being my cup of tea. It isn’t that I dislike history, quite the opposite. History fascinates me, but that’s because it’s (supposed to be) true. Historical fiction ends up boring me, most of the time, because it tends to focus on the aspects of history that I’m not as interested in. The minute speculative details that make up characters in books set in eras gone by can be interesting, but generally that style of writing gets tedious. Sara Gruen’s Water of Elephants is set in the era of the United States’ Great Depression, a time of economic collapse and social reorganization. Interesting, but not exactly gripping back story for a novel, I thought.

Well, I thought wrong. Water for Elephants actually delivers way above what I’d expected for a book that centers around a circus. When I think circus, I tend to think tacky and cheesy, especially since this book involves an animal character named Rosie who plays a large role in the story if you’ll pardon the pun. Due to the era of the book, a time that I suspected would have people being nicey-nicey to each other and demonstrating all the values we see in Golden Age television shows from the 1950’s. Again, not so. Gruen does a fantastic job of keeping this story grittily realistic and that actually explains what I dislike about historical fiction as a genre: it’s too romantic.

There is certainly a current of romance that runs through the pages of this novel, but it isn’t for the era the book addresses, it’s between the characters. The romance takes place on two levels, as a matter of fact. The lead character, Jacob Jankowski is a drop out from veterinary school and he is the one who joins up with the circus that travels through the story’s world. As a protagonist, he’d be interesting enough, but Gruen spices things up by giving us not only his life during the Great Depression, but another equally depressing situation that he’s currently enduring – life in a nursing home. We get to see both versions of Jacob and watch how he lives from two separate but connected perspectives. Frankly, it’s far more fascinating than I’d guessed either of these stories could truly be. After all, who would want to read about life in a nursing home or life scooping up elephant dung?

Along the way, we not only discover plenty about dear Jacob, we also meet a truly unique and interesting cast of characters with more variety of motivations than I’ve seen in a book for some time. These characters are not the TVland cardboard cutouts from that era. They are fully-fleshed human beings with tragedies, victories, lust, squalor, altruism and rock solid integrity. Gruen pulls no punches and she paints a much more vivid picture of what those days must’ve been like thanks to the enormous amount of research she put into the creation of this title.

I have to say that if you want to be taken to another time and you don’t want to sacrifice authenticity for nostalgia’s sake then Water for Elephants is a book you’ll appreciate.

Visit Sara Gruen’s website to learn more about her books: http://saragruen.com

Click here to get your hands on “Water for Elephants”

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