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Half an Elephant
Gusti
Picture Book
Ages 5 and up
Kane/Miller, 2006, 7-933605-09-X
  One day the Earth split in half. When it did this a lot of other things got split in half at the same time, including an elephant. The elephant was very distressed to lose half of itself and it set off to try to find its back end.
  It asked all the animals it met if they had seen the back end of an elephant but no one had. Everyone else was trying to find their own missing halves. After a while the elephant realized that it was really missing its other half and it tried to find the lost end of another animal to keep it company. Alas, this do not seem to work too well. Perhaps the front end of the elephant was just better off on its own.
  Meanwhile, somewhere far away, the back end of the elephant was in a very bad way. After all, the back end couldn’t even talk. It tried to join up with the front end of another animal to remedy the situation but it was not easy to find the right kind of collaboration. In the end the back end of the elephant decided that it too was better off on its own. 
  Then the world “became one again.” What would happen to the elephant now?
  For anyone who has struggled to understand his or her place in the world, this book is a must. Sometimes a sudden catastrophe, like the world splitting in two, can really throw a person for a loop. The world has changed and yet all one wants is for everything to go back to the way things were. And yet, sometimes, the new state of affairs is not so bad after all. Sometimes the new state of affairs is all right after all.
  This meaningful story has been illustrated in an often startling way by creating pictures using bits and pieces of metal, wood, tools, nails, screws and other pieces of ‘junk’ of all kinds. Children will love the way in which the animals have been created using the most surprising materials and they will enjoy trying to find which front half goes with which back half.
 

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