For those who loved War Horse (Spielberg's film based on it will be out this Christmas), Michael Morpurgo presents another unforgettable story, inspired by historical facts, about the bond between the human and animal world.
In a Canadian nursing home, elderly Lizzie tells nine-year-old Karl and his mother, a nurse, about the elephant she kept in her garden as a girl: "I did not know it at the time,... but this elephant... was going to change my life forever, change all our lives in my family. And you might say she was going to save our lives also." And so the elephant Marlene does, in Morpurgo's elegant, elegaic story-within-a-story that flashes back to World War II Germany. Lizzie, her mother and her younger brother, Karli--and Marlene, too--are so real that readers will feel the fear, the hunger and the cold they experience on their prodigious trek. Morpurgo balances the characters' anxiety and sadness with acts of human kindness, Karli's funny ways and a deeply satisfying ending. --Ellen Loughran, adjunct professor, Pratt Institute