FINISHED:
Morpurgo, Michael. (2011). An elephant in the garden. New York: Feiwel & Friends.

[With her father a soldier serving in World War II, Lizzie’s mother (Mutti) goes work at the nearby Dresden Zoo, immediately taking a shine to Marlene, a young elephant who has recently lost her mother. As Dresden begins to become a target for bombings, the zoo decides that they need to kill all of the animals to prevent them from escaping, but Mutti convinces the zoo director to let her keep Marlene in her care. After their home is destroyed in an air raid, Lizzie, her younger brother Karli, and Marlene set off on a walk toward Allied troops in Heidelberg , along the way coming across a Canadian paratrooper who has been shot down and eventually joins the family on their journey, pretending to be an older sibling in an effort to hide his true identity from the German army. During all of the madness of war, there is a sweet ray of hope where Lizzie and her family end up watching over a group of parentless choir children on their exodus, and, in an effort to keep their spirits up, promise each rides on Marlene’s back. Morpurgo, author of War Horse (Scholastic, 2007) doesn’t shy away from (nor does he beat you over the head with) an anti-war sentiment – early on, when the bombings begin, Mutti explains, “What we are seeing now is a world gone mad, children, a world full of brutes, all intent on killing one another. And we should not forget that we are all responsible for making it happen, for letting it happen.” As per an Author’s Note, Morpurgo has based his tale on two true World War II stories: one of a woman in Belfast who saved an elephant from being slaughtered at a zoo during a bombing raid, and the other documented by a friend’s grandmother who fled with hundreds of thousands of other German refugees toward American forces. Told using a framing technique of modern day Lizzie relating the story to a nurse and her son at the nursing home where Lizzie is spending the rest of her days, this is a moving yet unsentimental or gratuitous story of the neverending spirit, during wartime, of a young family... and their elephant.]

STARTED:
Barrows, Annie. (2011). Ivy + Bean: No news is good news. San Francisco: Chronicle.

[Hey, it's a new Ivy + Bean...]

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