Sunday Salon, Bloggy Book Club and All Girls Book Club Combo

I read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen for this month's Bloggy Book Club and for the first ever...All Girls Book Club, which is a book club that meets once a month. While I have loved blogging for Sunday Salon and for Bloggy Book Club and I love reading the comments of fellow reading enthusiasts on this blog and others...it was very gratifying to hear every one's opinion about this book in "real time"!

Water for Elephants was a great read...I know that I do write that phrase many times ...I am not a critic...I enjoy reading a story and I am led easily into it. I take the story for what it is...

In the Authors Notes in the back of the book, Sara Gruen writes that the idea of this book came about unexpectedly while researching for an entirely different book. The Chicago Tribune ran an article on Edward J Kelty, a photographer who followed traveling circuses around America in the 1920's and 1930's. The photograph that was included fascinated her so much she began researching Circuses and had abandoned her first idea for a book entirely instead deciding to write about the train circuses.

This is a story about a young man and his loss of both his parent's during the Depression and his adventure of running away with the circus. Sara Gruen contrasts the world of a showman's glamor and equestrian pageantry with the senseless cruelty of a sleazy sideshow.
This is also the story of an old man and his aged memories and his real fear of losing control of his mind and his life...and those memories he holds so dear.

The All Girls Book Club met and discussed this book at length and all of us either liked or loved this book very much! It is a great historical fiction and I liked it very much!
We decided that we will all go to the movie that is being made out of this book starring Reese Witherspoon, Sean Penn and Robert Pattinson