The Magician's Elephant

Over the summer I read a great book called the Magician's Elephant. It is about a boy name Peter. He lives with an old soldier named Vilna Lutz and his parents and sister are dead. He thinks his sister is dead until one day he goes to the market to buy food, but uses the money Vilna Lutz game him to buy food to go to a fortune teller. He asks one question to the fortune teller: "Is my sister Adele still alive?" The fortune teller tells him: "You must find the elephant who will lead you to her." Peter has no idea about an elephant because there isn't one in the entire village. Later that evening, in the Opera House there is a magician. He tries to do a trick to magically appear flowers and instead an elephant magically falls through the roof of the Opera House. This is a suprise to many people in the Opera House. Once Peter hears about the elephant he immidiately wants to see him, but nobody can see the elephant. Later in the book, Peter starts to dream about Adele and where she is now. Soon Adele starts to dream about Peter. This is a great book because it is about how two people who didn't even know the other was alive, come back together.

I have also read another book by this author, Kate DiCamillo, which I really like. She is a really good author and her stories are very creative and engaging.

In my last blog entry, I wrote about the book Elsewhere. This time I am going to write about how I chose this book. I chose the book Elsewhere because I read the back and it sounded very interesting. The back had a letter from one of the main characters, Elizabeth, that was to her science teacher saying that she is dead and that she will not be able to make it to the science fair this year and is sad about it. At the beginning of the book, Liz gets to look through binoculors to see her funeral and she sees that her science teacher is not there and was sad. So she also includes this in the letter on the back of the book. This made me curious because I was wondering why if she is dead how the science teacher got the letter and how did she wrote it.

Now that I am reading the book I am learning more about Liz. By looking in the binoculors she finds out that she is dead. She was killed because she got in a bicycle accident. I also learned that the reason her head was shaved (that I talked about in my first blog entry) is because she was in an operation after her biking accident. She still has a hard time believing that she is dead until she looks in the binoculors and knows that it is really true. Now she has to learn to live in a place that is different.