Cora and the Elephant

Cora, a castaway child who was adopted and raised by African elephants, persuades her elephant mother and father to travel with her to San Francisco in search of her roots

PreSchool-Grade 2?Cora leads an idyllic life in Africa until she raises an important question: Why has she been raised by a pair of elephants? Her adoptive parents, Edward and Ophelia, explain how she had been washed ashore with no identification but a life-preserver tag. Determined to find her origins, the little girl devises a scheme to raise money for the three to fly to San Francisco. There they meet disappointment when the tag leads only to a warehouse. The factory owner invites them for an extended stay, but Africa's call proves strong, and they return home wiser and more content. The charming watercolor cartoon illustrations meld with the text to make the fantastic series of events plausible. Indeed, few elephants since Babar have adapted so readily to city life. Together words and illustrations stretch the imaginations of all who have wondered about their origins. Cora, Ophelia, and Edward are characters worth meeting.?Kathy Piehl, Mankato State University, MN
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After telling their adopted daughter Cora how they found her in her infancy, washed ashore, Edward and Ophelia-who, unlike Cora, are elephants-promise to pursue their sole clue to her origins: a life-preserver tag labeled "Pier 38, San Francisco." Cora becomes obsessed with discovering where she came from. But after a hard-earned trip from their African watering hole to San Francisco, girl and elephants learn that "Pier 38" is a life-preserver factory. Rovetch (Trigwater Did It) says merely that Cora is "sad and disappointed" before launching into her heroine's pleasure in a protracted stay with the factory owner and his wife. The point of this scattershot story is unclear: why raise the question of Cora's parentage only to drop it? In what seems an effort to allay the anxieties raised by the plot, the illustrations are uniformly sunny and bright, and Edward and Ophelia, rotund, cuddly and thoroughly anthropomorphized, bear more than a passing resemblance to Babar and his friends. Ages 3-8.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ages 4-6. Young Cora lives with two elephants, Edward and Ophelia, under the boabab tree in the jungle. She arrived as a baby in a life preserver tagged "Pier 38, San Francisco." Eager for a visit home, Cora sells enough coconuts to get them to Frisco, but alas, Pier 38 is a life preserver warehouse, not the home of which Cora has dreamed. Undaunted, the trio decide to explore San Francisco anyway, and Edward and Ophelia wind up with jobs. Cora, for her part, learns lots of human stuff (such as the many ways to do your hair), but she soon realizes that Edward doesn't like being stuffed into a suit and that Ophelia would rather be hobnobbing with her jungle pals than showing off stuffed animals in a museum. So it's back to Africa, where Cora goes into town once a week to do people things; but mostly she swims and plays at the watering hole and frolics in the brown sand with the pachyderms. Rovetch neatly pulls off the girl-living-with-elephants scenario, mostly because Edward and Ophelia are such dears, who wouldn't want to live with them? The text is aided by Weston's fresh and funny watercolor art featuring Babar-esque characters who make you smile just looking at them. A delightful tale that proves the adage home is where the herd is. Ilene Cooper