The book is about a stable boy, Tom Page, who begins raising two elephants for his master when they are bought for the family estate. Tom forms a special bond with the elephants and names them Jenny and Timothy. For reasons later revealed, Timothy does not stay in the picture for long but Jenny becomes an inseparable friend to Tom.
I read a great Amazon customer review that compared "The Elephant Keeper" to "Black Beauty" by Anne Sewell, one of my favorite books growing up. Both novels follow an animal's life closely as it moves from place to place and the hardships that come in its way. The big difference between the two though is that "Black Beauty" is told from the animal's point of view while "The Elephant Keeper" is from the perspective of the animal's trainer. "Black Beauty" rings so thoroughly with sincerity that the reader easily forgets it is a horse who is narrating. "The Elephant Keeper," however, is harder to believe even though it's from a human's point of view.
Despite some inconsistencies in Tom's character and a rather slow-moving plot, I really enjoyed this book. That is until the last chapter. In this chapter, the author proceeds to try to wrap up the tale in a bizarrely confusing way. I reread it just to make sure I hadn't missed something, but no, I hadn't. It really just didn't make sense.
One of the most frustrating things to me as a reader is when the author doesn't finish a novel well. It's as if they just gave up despite all the hard work they put into writing the book in the first place. I groaned with despair and threw "The Elephant Keeper" onto the ground after finishing it. And I then began to unload on my husband everything Nicholson and his editor had done wrong with the ending. It's my opinion they could have cut out the entire last chapter and it would have been a much better book. But maybe that's just me.
If you want some other opinions on "The Elephant Keeper," check out these reviews by the Washington Post and The Independent.
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