“You must follow the elephant,” said the fortuneteller. “She will lead you there.”
- The inventive character names: Peter Augustus Duchene; Vilna Lutz; Madam La Vaughn; Leo Matienne; Hans Ickman; Count Quintet; and the dog Iddo.
- The rich vocabulary: gesture, audacity, honorable, midst, excruciating, and sleight for example
- I had forgotten about the importance of dreams in this story
- The city and the winter cold feel like additional characters.
- The way Kate DiCamillo builds the story so that a reader just knows there will be a very happy ending. I was so happy to discover Leo and Gloria longed for a child of their own.
- Readers have to 'join the dots' in the final scenes to work out that this does come true and the two children are now living with and loved by Leo and Gloria Matienne.
- There is an important minor theme in this story about the futility of war.
- It is wonderful that this book is designed with lots of white space and a larger font size.
- The short chapters and rapid scene changes make this a perfect book to read aloud.
- The way the people in the town became obsessed about the elephant reminded me of the books I talked about in a previous post that tell the story of the arrival of a giraffe in France.
Awards and Honors
- ALSC Notable Children’s Book
- American Booksellers Association Indies Choice Book Awards
- American Library Association Notable Children’s Recordings
- BookBrowse Awards, Best Young Adult Book
- Booklist Editors’ Choice: Books for Youth
- Chicago Public Library Best Books for Children and Teens
- Colorado Children’s Book Award
- Delaware Diamonds Booklist
- Hudson News Best Book of the Year
- Indie Next List
- Kentucky Bluegrass Award
- Maine Student Book Award
- Minnesota Book Awards
- Parents’ Choice Award
- Publishers Weekly Cuffie Award
- Washington State Scandiuzzi Children’s Book Award, Picture Books
Tonight, I have discovered there is now a movie of The Magician's Elephant. After watching the trailer the movie looks very, very different from the book.
This page from Candlewick has a wealth of activities and an audio sample to use with The Magician's Elephant.
Here are a couple of text quotes:
He stood in the small patch of light making its sullen way through the open flap of the tent. He let the fortuneteller take his hand. She examined it closely, moving her eyes back and forth and back and forth, as if there were a whole host of very small words inscribed there, an entire book about Peter Augustus Duchene composed atop his palm.
Not far from the Apartments Polonaise, across the rooftops and through the darkness of the winter night, stood the Bliffendorf Opera House, and that evening upon its stage, a magician of advanced years and failing reputation performed the most astonishing magic of his career. He intended to conjure a bouquet of lilies, but instead, the magician brought forth an elephant.
The questions that mattered, the questions that needed to be asked, were these: Where did the elephant come from? And what did it mean that she had come to the city of Baltese?
I first read and talked about The Magician's Elephant (published 2009) back in 2010. Today on my train journey I re-read and devoured the whole book again and I absolutely loved it. I think I have read nearly every book written by Kate DiCamillo. She recently visited Colby Sharp's school in Parma - I loved reading about the visit and also I loved the way all of the staff embraced this visit and shared many of her books with their students.
You can see the gentle art from inside The Magician's Elephant on the illustrator web page. Here is another book illustrated by Yoko Tanaka:
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