Books by author: Sara Gruen

Ape House is a huge letdown after the excellent Water for Elephants. The characters are flat and cartoonish, and the plot is ridiculous. There's none of the charm of the previous book, except in a few passages at the beginning that focus on the Bonobos. I wanted to like this book, but I had to force myself to finish it.

Water for Elephants is mainstream fiction at its best. Gruen's protagonist is a 90-year-old man in an assisted living facility who flashes back to his early twenties when he served as a veterinarian for a traveling circus during the early days of the Great Depression. The details of circus life are interesting and extremely well described, and the characters are even more colorful than you might expect. The opening prologue is a little bit contrived (as you find out at end), and the ending is over-the-top sappy to the point of being completely unrealistic, but the meat of the novel is well executed from all angles, and I was more than willing to forgive the minor flaws.