A charming and sweet story about an aging elephant and the people who love her. This would be a great "comfort read" (lacking sex, drugs, violence, etc). My only mild complaint is that the character development is a bit odd. For example, several characters spoke in mildly southern accents, but the book takes place in Washington, and their Arkansas roots were mentioned in passing about 2/3 of the way through. The same goes for the fact that for a while they're the only African-Americans in town (or are they?). While in an ideal world this would be unimportant, in 1950s America it surely would have been a big factor (and does come up late in the story as a key point). I think the mental images of these folks would have been much clearer had this been brought up earlier. Maybe the author was trying to avoid having her main characters fall into a stereotype early in the book. The setting was a bit ambiguous as well. In this way I thought the storytelling was a bit clunky, but in the end I did enjoy the book, and these are relatively minnor complaints. Perhaps I'll look into another by this author.
