IT’s MY CHOICE

Have you ever been to a circus? In my case, yes. A circus went to my school a few years ago, They don’t have any animals with them. No lions, no funny monkeys, no elephants. But they have various equipments. In Sara Gruen’s “Water For Elephants“, you’ll be able to feel how is it to live in a circus in the 1930’s.

The problem was that there were so many technical jargons about circus throughout the book. It’s hard to imagine what was happening in some parts of the book.There were also so many characters and they were introduced almost at once and most were not clearly described. There were also characters that were quite misleading. There was this character named as Camel. It was a bit misleading at some times because the reader wouldn’t know if the protagonist was referring to the man named Camel or to the animals. There was also this character named as Cecil. I thought that he was a female. I was wrong.

What I have noticed was that there were less conversations in the book compared to other books. Also, there were only little sudden twists of events. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the book.

The first time I heard about it (thanks to NY Times), I was intrigued with the title. Strange title, isn’t? What a unique book. After reading it, I still didn’t get it why its title was so. I searched about it in the internet and it turned out that it was entitled “Water for Elephants” because of an incident between the protagonist and another resident of the nursing home. The latter said that when he was a kid, he gave water for the elephants, but the former doesn’t want to accept that. And they had argued about that.

*****

Jacob Jankowski was in his final year in college when his parents met a car accident. They died immediately, leaving Jacob alone. There was no money left under his name. Their house, he found out, was mortgaged. Because all of these problems, he didn’t answer anything in his final examination and walked out of the examination hall.

Then, he found this train and boarded it. Without him knowing it, he got inside the train of Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Luckily for him, he got a job in the circus. He worked as a veterinarian even though he is not a real veterinarian. He fed horses, cats (e.g. lions, tigers), orangutans, giraffes, and other species of animals, he nursed sick animals, trained an elephant who could only understand in Polish.

But during his stay in the circus, temptations followed him. Barbara, the sexy performer was one of the temptations that surrounded him. But the worst thing was that he fell in love with Marlena, the wife of August. Why worst? Well, August have paranoid schizophrenia — sometimes he seems to be okay, but there were times where it would be stupid to get near him — and August is Jacob’s boss.

Join Jacob throughout his journey around the United States of America, involving love and murder. What a riveting book!