osprey_archer | Book Review: The Magician's Elephant

At the end of the century before last, in the market square in the city of Baltese, there stood a boy with a hat on his head and a coin in his hand. The boy's name was Peter Augustus Duchene, and the coin that he held did not belong to him but was instead the property of his guardian, an old soldier named Vilna Lutz, who had sent the boy to the market for fish and bread.

Thus begins Kate DiCamillo's The Magician's Elephant, and thus it continues: the lilting cadence of the prose, that deceptive simplicity that lies like a thin coat of snow smoothing a craggy landscape, the fairy tale feel of a story set long ago and in a land so far away that one cannot pin it to a map.

Given my bitter loathing of DiCamillo's The Tiger Rising, in which she brutally slaughters the titular tiger, it is something of a miracle that I picked up another of her books - especially one with another defenseless animal in the title. But by mistake I read the first paragraph of The Magician's Elephant, and could not stop, and found that it was splendid.

It's like sitting by the window on a winter night, drinking hot chocolate and waiting for a loved one to get home through the snow storm: comfort and unease, and relief when the snow-rimed sojourner throws open the door.