The Magician's Elephant
Published in 2009, The Magician's Elephant is Kate DiCamillo's lyrical middle grade novel set in the fictional city of Baltese. Ten year old Peter Augustus Duchene is being trained for a soldier's life by an old veteran and grieves a sister he was told had died. When he spends a coin on a fortune teller instead of bread, she tells him his sister is alive and that an elephant will lead him to her. That night, in a nearby opera house, a magician attempts a small trick and instead conjures an elephant that crashes through the roof and onto a noblewoman's lap. The novel follows Peter, the magician, the elephant, a stonecutter, a beggar, a nun, and many others as their lives slowly braid together. Illustrated by Yoko Tanaka and written in DiCamillo's spare, fable like prose, the book has been a bestseller and the basis of a Netflix animated film.
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What you might want to know about The Magician's Elephant
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Kate DiCamillo's modern fairy tale about an orphan boy, a fortune teller, and an elephant that falls through a roof.
It is aimed at middle grade readers around ages 8 to 12, though it is widely read aloud and enjoyed by adults.
Yes, Netflix released an animated adaptation in 2023.
The Magician's Elephant was written by Kate DiCamillo, published in 2001 by Walker Books, Limited.
The Magician's Elephant is 204 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Magician's Elephant takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
The Magician's Elephant is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.