White Bone (Paperback: 336 pages)

Enhanced Muze Note

Gowdy brilliantly imbues these uncommon characters with wrenching emotions. Even though the elephants clash over how to survive, their relationships are intimate, romantic, and sometimes traumatic. There's a warmth in Gowdy's writing that can only stem from the certainty that there is wondrousness in the most derelict and unexpected circumstances--that life in all forms is awesome. Writing from the point of view of animals is a very concrete way of expressing that: of turning your back on the belief that humans hold the exclusive rights to important experience, to the business of making the world right.

Enhanced Muze Note

These elephants are more distinct and moving as characters than most characters in novels who are humans....I was simply swept up in it. I loved it.

Enhanced Muze Note

The novel is a tour de force, compelling and always absorbing, not least because, while it humanizes the elephants, it also acknowledges their distance from us, and allows them the dignity of difference.