The Magician's Elephant
Kate DiCamillo
Candlewick Press, $16.99, 202 pages; ages 6-10 for read-aloud, 8-10 for reading to oneself
The bedtime stories that seem to work best at engaging yet soothing a tired young person have three traits:
• A gentle story with ...
• A touch of fantasy and ...
• A peaceful, slightly repetitive tone that enfolds the child until slumber.
Most of these stories are picture books, but Kate DiCamillo has managed to create a lovely one for school-age children in her new book, "The Magician's Elephant."
The story begins, as many classics do, with a child living in hard circumstances. Here, "at the end of the century before last," is young Peter Augustus Duchene, given one florit and sent to the market square to buy bread and fish.
Ah, look, a fortuneteller's tent has appeared in the marketplace, with a sign that promises answers to "the most profound and difficult questions that could possibly be posed by the human mind or heart," for the sum of one florit.
Peter, who is 10, has harbored a question in his heart for several years: Is his sister alive? Their parents, he knows, are dead, but he vaguely recalls a baby who disappeared just after his newly widowed mother died.
Peter has lived since then with Vilna Lutz, an old, old soldier who commanded Peter's father in battle. But Vilna Lutz said his sister died. What is the truth?
Peter pays the florit to the fortuneteller and gets an answer and a puzzle: His sister is alive, but to reach her, he must "follow the elephant."
What elephant? There are no zoos, no circuses in the small town. Peter is perplexed and angry: If his sister is alive, Vilna Lutz is lying.
That night, at the opera house, a magician performing for the town's elite conjures up, yes, an elephant, which crashes through the ceiling and falls into the lap of a society woman.
A policeman "with a soul of a poet," who lives in the same apartment building as Peter, becomes another player in the fantastical drama that will eventually reunite Peter and his sister, and send the homesick elephant back where she belongs.
DiCamillo won a Newbery Medal a few years ago for "The Tale of Despereaux," a fairy tale that became a movie last year. But she first became popular among young readers with "Because of Winn-Dixie," a funny, realistic story set in Florida, a book I much preferred. Her move into fairy stories, I feared, had ruined her knack for creating a time and place that comes alive as the tale unfolds.
But in this book, DiCamillo has united her obvious love for fantasy with her best descriptive powers. Peter's little town, shrouded in cold, is beautifully drawn as it is changed in small, joyful ways by the seeming miracle of the elephant. It's a story that will have children snuggling down into their pillows, awaiting wonderful dreams.
Call The Bee's Kathy Morrison, (916) 321-1080.
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