The Elephant in the Room

Fans of Holly Goldberg Sloan’s heart-warming, life-affirming novels will find many of her favourite themes in her new book. Here are families remade and reunited, and outsiders finding new friends. Sila Tekin lives with her dad in Oregon, both of them longing for the day when her mum can return from Turkey. Mum has had to go back to her old home to sort out problems with her immigration status. A trip that was meant to take eight days has turned into one of 200+ and there’s no end in sight. Sila’s school knows nothing of this, but her teachers can see that something is wrong. Their solution is to put her into a special peer programme pairing her with another silent child. Mateo is autistic and it seems has decided that not speaking is the only way to blend in at school. Their relationship develops thanks to more unexpected and very unusual friendships, those between Sila and Gio Gardino, a widower in his sixties; and Gio’s recently acquired elephant, Veda. Yes, as well as the metaphorical ones, there is an actual elephant in the room (or more accurately on Gio’s large, walled estate – he won a fortune in a lottery syndicate at the factory where he used to work). A screenwriter, Goldberg Sloan is not afraid to create bold cinematic situations like this, but she’s equally good at depicting the small things that tell us so much about her characters and their inner lives and the story is a beautifully sensitive portrayal of family love and the power of friendship to transform lives. The book’s final lines spell out how important it is to keep going, to keep hoping and to believe in the possibility of change. That’s the reward she gives her characters, and their happiness will spread to her readers too.

Read our Authorgraph interview with Holly Goldberg Sloan.