Genre: MG
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Our girl was lost from her family during a tornado, saved by an elephant and adopted by the zoo. What a premise, yes? This happened when she was about 5 and now she is 12. She still hasn't found her family and the zoo train engineer has taken care of her all this time. She lives in the zoo with him and is friends with a boy that also lives in the zoo. She has lots of plans for this summer, but everything ends up going a little crazy and not according to plan.
That's because she finally gets to visit the elephants and it turns out that the elephant that saved her can actually sort of talk to her. And this elephant tells her to go check out a spot in the woods next to the zoo. And when she does, she unearths quite the secret! And maybe even a clue to her past!
This book gave me "we bought a zoo" vibes and that's one of my all time favorite movies so... cool! We also get lots of parallels to the book "Island of the Blue Dolphins" which our character has just had to read for school. And that is also cool.
So yeah, I really enjoyed and became totally immersed in the mystery that our girl needed to solve. What a sweet, lovely story!
