AN ELEPHANT IN THE BACKYARD

Young readers may never complain about feeding or cleaning up after the dog again once they’ve met Wan Pen, a four-year-old pet/sibling/working animal belonging to a family in a Thai village. In Tha Klang, domesticated elephants consume about 400 pounds of food and bathtubs of water daily, while wandering freely (when they’re not putting on shows for tourists) over roads of “dirt and gravel mixed together with years and years of mashed elephant droppings.” In big, sharp, colorful scenes, photojournalist Sobol depicts Wan Pen and her pachyderm compatriots carrying, being tended by, even playing soccer with, a small corps of cheerful local children in well-kept rural settings. Sobol tucks several Thai words into his engaging narrative, and closes with a page of random elephant facts. He isn’t the first to visit a village where people and elephants cohabit, but he offers a closer, more intimate portrait than readers will find in Jeremy C. Schmidt’s In the Village of the Elephants (1994), or Roland Smith’s In the Forest with Elephants (1998). (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-9)