\ Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Water for Elephants
By Sara Gruen
350 pages


Ug, so not gonna lie, I was SO excited to read this book. I had read nothing but good things about it and they made it into a movie (which I haven't seen, but was planning on it. I like to read the books first) and (usually) if books are made into movies there's something to them. I mean, over 5000 reviews on amazon giving it an average of 4.5 stars can't be wrong. So you can imagine my excitement when I came across this novel at my local thrift store for $1.50.

 Boy oh boy am I glad I didn't waste any more money than that on it. I pretty much gave it 1 star because I was worried that if I gave it none people would think I didn't review it.

Summary
So this is a story about a boy named Jacob in great depression era America who's parents both die in a car crash just as he is about to graduate from Vet school. He is so devastated he doesn't' even finish his final exams for graduation and pretty much throws getting his degree out the window. He feels that he has nothing else to live for in his current life and so he runs away and jumps aboard a circus train in the middle of the night. The rest of the story is basically him interacting with the circus people and trying to save them and the animals from the evil ring master.


My Review
Ok, so we know that I hated this book. Why? you ask. Well here's why.

My first complaint is that it swears a TON. I'm not talking about a little here and there, but it's like F-bomb every other paragraph and everything else in between. I get that these hard circus people aren't going to have squeaky clean mouths, but seriously! It was so distracting and just plain stupid.

Second, even if there were no distracting swearing I still would have given it 2 MAYBE 3 stars because it was just a terribly boring story. The characters were flat as pancakes, the setting had so much potential to be amazing (who doesn't love old time circuses?) but was not detailed enough to be interesting and there was honestly no plot whatsoever. I thought it would be some epic love story (that's what the movie trailers led me to believe) but really, the only reason I could tell that Jacob fell for Marlena was because she looked good in her sparkly pink sequin outfit. Awesome.

It took me about 100 pages in to be completely sick of the swearing and about-to-be-in-a-coma bored of the story that I started skimming, hoping to find the 5000 reviewers 4.5 star book, but I never found it.

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