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Sara Gruen, 37, never went to a circus when she was growing up in London, Ontario.
Now she's an expert.
She spent about five months intensively researching American circus life through archival photos, old books and museums for her historical novel, Water for Elephants.
She says she dragged her family to any circus within driving distance of her home north of Chicago. She went to Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wis., and the Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, Fla.
Gruen's original inspiration was a Chicago Tribune article about a "photographer who followed and documented train circuses during the 1920s and 1930s," she writes in The Algonkian, a newsletter from her publisher, Algonquin.
"Back then if you were a circus of any importance, you were a train circus," she says in an interview. "The other circuses that didn't travel by train were dragged by horses from town to town and were called mudshows because their circus would get stuck in the mud."
Gruen says her novel mixes fiction and fact, but "every single detail had to be checked -- what the counters in diners were made of, whether state cars (on trains) had showers."
Her novel, set during the Great Depression, is a love story between a veterinarian and a horse rider who work for a shabby train circus.
But Rosie the elephant is the showstopper. This portrait was drawn, in part, from two remarkable elephant stories.
In 1903, in an experiment conducted by Thomas Edison, an elephant, Topsy, was electrocuted. Her offense: killing her trainer "after he fed her a lit cigarette." Then there was Old Mom, who, it was discovered, only understood German and was really quite smart. (In Water for Elephants, Rosie understands Polish better than English.)
Gruen lives with her husband and three sons, and a menagerie that includes one horse, two goats, two dogs and three cats.
But no elephant. "The neighbors might object," she says.
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