As promised, I have finished Water for Elephants. I liked the ending; Jacob is able to marry his love and together they're able to raise a family (complete with an elephant as a family pet.) One thing that bothered me though is when Marlena's first baby is born and because of his red hair, Jacob knows it isn't his. He doesn't mind, he says, he would love the baby no matter what. This upset me because as a reader, I want to see Jacob happy, finally living a normal life and this fact puts a dent in that perfect vision. Jacob also mentions having to bail his children out of jail a few times, but that these were some of the best years of his life. Another dent in the perfect family image! But perhaps this is one of the main themes of the book: there's beauty in even the most grotesque situations. The most obvious example of this being, of course, the circus, where some of the most disturbing people live but is still seen as a romantic concept despite this.
Reading the authors' notes in the back of the book, Sara Gruen mentions that most of the small details in the book were stolen from real events she found entertaining during her research. For example, almost all of the elephant's strange quirks are stolen from the quirks of true circus elephants. At first I found this upsetting, (why couldn't the author think of her own quirks?) but later decided this was okay. It's fine for her to include these details so we can be just as entertained as she was when she heard of them.
I won't mention what the quirks are... that's up to you to discover when you read Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants!
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