The Magician's Elephant

by Kate DiCamillo, Yoko Tanaka (Illustrator)

Overview

Kate DiCamillo’s New York Times best-selling fable about trusting the unexpected and making the extraordinary come true.

When a fortuneteller's tent appears in the market square of the city of Baltese, orphan Peter Augustus Duchene knows the questions that he needs to ask: Does his sister still live? And if so, how can he find her? The fortuneteller's mysterious answer (an elephant! An elephant will lead him there!) sets off a chain of events so remarkable, so impossible, that you will hardly dare to believe it’s true. With atmospheric illustrations by fine artist Yoko Tanaka, here is a dreamlike and captivating tale that could only be narrated by Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo. In this timeless fable, she evokes the largest of themes — hope and belonging, desire and compassion — with the lightness of a magician’s touch. With dreamlike illustrations and a cover by Yoko Tanaka.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780763680886
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	12/08/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.63(h) x 0.59(d)
Lexile:	730L (what's this?)
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

About the Author

  

Hometown:

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Date of Birth:

March 25, 1964

Place of Birth:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Education:

B.A. in English, University of Florida at Gainesville, 1987

Read an Excerpt

Peter stood in the small patch of light making its sullen way through the open flap of the tent. He let the fortuneteller take his hand. She examined it closely, moving her eyes back and forth and back and forth, as if there a whole host of very small words inscribed there, an entire book about Peter Augustus Duchene composed atop his palm.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Magician's Elephant"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Kate DiCamillo.
Excerpted by permission of Candlewick Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Interviews

Q & A with Author Kate DiCamillo about her new novel The Magician's Elephant

Q. What is your definition of magic? What has happened in your life that is magical or unexpected?

A. I guess my definition of magic is something very close to the definition the magician gives toward the end of the story: "Magic is always impossible. It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic." I would add, though, that while magic is impossible from beginning to end, it is also possible. Somehow (who knows how?) the impossible gets turned into the possible. That's magic.
Which leads very nicely into the next part of this question: What has happened in my life that is magical or unexpected? Telling stories seems like magic to me; it seems both impossible and possible in that same way. And what has happened to me and my stories - people reading them, liking them, and me getting to make my living telling them - well, talk about unexpected. Talk about magical.

Q. The Magician's Elephant features an animal character. This is a common theme in your novels. Why an elephant this time?

A. I didn't think, Oh boy, I'm going to put an elephant in a story. I guess it happened this way: The story began for me with the magician and the fact that he wanted to perform real magic, true magic. That magician appeared before me in the lobby of a hotel in New York City. I had, in my satchel, a notebook that I was going to give as a gift to someone. The notebook had an elephant on the cover. And when I went into my bag to get my notebook to write a description of the magician I had just caught sight of,I happened to see that other notebook, the one with a picture of an elephant on the front of it.

Q. Was there a specific place that inspired the setting for the city of Baltese?

A. No, but after I finished writing The Magician's Elephant, I saw a movie that took place in Bruges, and I couldn't concentrate at all on what was happening in the movie
because I was so struck by how much Bruges looked like the city of Baltese, the city I had imagined.

Q. The fortuneteller tells Peter that "truth is forever changing." Why is this an important line in the story, and why did you want to share it with children in general?

A. I think this comes back to the whole idea of the impossible suddenly becoming the possible. We have to remain open to those moments when everything can change. I actually think that children are much better at doing this than adults are because they are much less likely to see things in a black-and-white way. All of us, children and adults, need to remind ourselves that the impossible can become possible. That's one of the great gifts of stories.

Q.What was your predominant feeling while writing this book? Was it faith, or fear? Do you know how your endings will turn out when you start?

A. Oh, I'm always afraid when I'm writing. And I never know how things will turn out. This time around it was particularly terrifying because there were so many different balls up in the air, and I had no idea how I would catch them all. But even though I was terrified, I was also, in a strange and wonderful way, healed by the telling of this story. I got out of my own way and let the story tell me how it would all come together. At the same time, I felt something come together, kind of knit itself, inside of me.

Q. How do you feel about the illustrations? Have you ever met Yoko Tanaka?

A. I think the illustrations are an astonishment, a wonder, a marvel. They literally take my breath away. They are haunting and otherworldly and just exactly right. I have never met Yoko, no. And yet she painted the world I imagined.

Q. Isn't that strange and wonderful?

A. Impossible, but true.

Editorial Reviews

Kate DiCamillo has a gift, inequitably distributed among writers of all kinds, of eliminating the obvious and still egging on the reader. She writes beautifully but thinks simply. The purity of her prose – the reader goes from paragraph to paragraph delighting in the wonderful simple sentences – only adds to the winsome purity of her vision.
—New York Times Book Review

DiCamillo’s carefully crafted prose creates an evocative aura of timelessness for a story that is, in fact, timeless. Tanaka’s acrylic artwork is meticulous in detail and aptly matches the tone of the narrative.
—School Library Journal (starred review)

Reading like a fable told long ago, with rich language that begs to be read aloud, this is a magical story about hope and love, loss and home, and of questioning the world versus accepting it as it is.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the unexpectedly miraculous feats of a two-bit illusionist to the transformative powers of love, forgiveness, and a good mutton stew, there is much magic afoot in this fable-like tale… The profound and deeply affecting emotions at work in the story are buoyed up by the tale’s succinct, lyrical text, gentle touches of humor, and uplifting message of redemption, hope, and the interminable power of asking ‘what if?
—Booklist (starred review)

Thoughtful readers will feel a quiet satisfaction with this almost dainty tale of impossible happenings.
—VOYA

DiCamillo’s allegorical novel seems to pack more mass per square inch than average. The plot is fantastical, surreal…And the prose is remarkable, reflecting influences from Kafka to the theater of the absurd to Laurel-and-Hardy humor.
—The Horn Book

The mannered prose and Tanaka's delicate, darkly hued paintings give the story a somber and old-fashioned feel. The absurdist elements—street vendors peddle chunks of the now-infamous opera house ceiling with the cry “Possess the plaster of disaster!”—leaven the overall seriousness, and there is a happy if predictable ending for the eccentric cast of anguished characters, each finding something to make them whole.
—Publishers Weekly

Kate DiCamillo tells a tale of ‘hope, redemption, faith, love, and believing in the impossible’ with her usual quiet elegant prose.
—Library Media Connection

Tanaka’s shadowy, evocative acrylic paintings echo the dreamy nature of the storytelling and add a surprising amount of solidity (and a particularly nice elephant).
—Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books

With its rhythmic sentences and fairy-tale tone, this novel yields solitary pleasures but begs to be read aloud. Hearing it in a shared space can connect us, one to one, regardless of age, much like the book's closing image: a small stone carving, hands linked, of the elephant's friends.
—Washington Post Book World

Though DiCamillo's first success was with realistic fiction, she has since explored fantasy, here looking at how individuals and society take an impossible event into their narrative of the way the world is. Is it broken or fixable by those who embrace the unusual?
—Chicago Tribune

DiCamillo's elegant, evocative prose underpins the otherworldliness of Baltese, a place where a long-accepted truth can be shattered as easily as an elephant crashes through the opera-house ceiling.
—Austin American-Statesman

Readers willing to venture a little deeper into the darkness will be reassured and rewarded by the singular sense of hope that nearly glows from DiCamillo's prose, and from the incandescent illustrations created by Yoko Tanaka.
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

The power of DiCamillo’s writing enables the hope and determination of the characters to break through the gloom that penetrates the story...DiCamillo has again captured the loneliness and unwavering optimism that can only be found in children.
—Foreword

Using short yet powerful sentences and cinematic descriptions, DiCamillo creates another emotion-swelling gem in what is becoming an impressive crown of work.
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

Lyrical language and many interesting characters make this a wonderful read aloud book or one to be savored alone.
—Kansas City Star

Bringing all these characters together for a happy ending requires its own special magic, which is enhanced by DiCamillo's finely rendered Old World writing style — and the gorgeously muted pencil illustrations of Los Angeles artist Yoko Tanaka.
—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

When a fortuneteller sets up shop in the market square of Baltese, one earnest young man is among her first customers. Peter Augustus Duchene doesn't dawdle over his romantic future or his past lives; he wants to know whether his sister lives and, if so, can he bring her safety. The fortuneteller's answers are puzzling. She assures him that an elephant will lead him to his beloved lost sibling, a promise that leaves him waiting for a solution that might not come. An absorbing story about hope and persistence by the Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo. Now in paperback and NOOKbook.

Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo tells a timeless tale as "strange and lovely and promising" as her title character. The occasional illustrations, too, are dreamlike and magical. In delicate shades of gray, Yoko Tanaka's acrylics convey the city's low wintry light and the mood of a place haunted by a recent, unnamed war. With its rhythmic sentences and fairy-tale tone, this novel yields solitary pleasures but begs to be read aloud. Hearing it in a shared space can connect us, one to one, regardless of age, much like the book's closing image: a small stone carving, hands linked, of the elephant's friends.
—The Washington Post

Mary Quattlebaum

DiCamillo writes here in a register entirely her own, catching not the whimsical-fabulous note of earlier masters for young readers, nor the jokey-realistic one that has too often taken its place, but instead a mood of sober magic that unfolds into something that can be called, without pejorative, "sentimental," meaning straightforward and heartfelt. The style may evoke Calvino, but the substance belongs to Christmas…the magic of DiCamillo's stories is that while they have the dignity of literature, they're never unduly "literary." Young readers are caught up in the fable before they know they are being fabulized at, trapped in the poetry of the allegory without any idea that allegories are set as traps by authors.
—The New York Times

Adam Gopnik

Ten-year-old Peter Augustus Duchene goes to the market for fish and bread but spends it at the fortuneteller's tent instead. Seeking his long-lost sister, Peter is told, "You must follow the elephant. She will lead you there." And that very night at the Bliffenendorf Opera House, a magician's spell goes awry, conjuring an elephant that crashes through the ceiling and lands on Madam Bettine LaVaughn. Reading like a fable told long ago, with rich language that begs to be read aloud, this is a magical story about hope and love, loss and home, and of questioning the world versus accepting it as it is. Brilliant imagery juxtaposes "glowering and resentful" gargoyles and snow, stars and the glowing earth, and Tanaka's illustrations (not all seen) bring to life the city and characters from "the end of the century before last." A quieter volume than The Tale of Despereaux (2003) and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (2006), this has an equal power to haunt readers long past the final page. (Fantasy. 8-13)

Kirkus Reviews