Clara: The (Mostly) True Story of the Rhinoceros Who Dazzled Kings, Inspired Artists, and Won the Hearts of Everyone…While She Ate Her Way Up and Down a Continent!

In the mid-eighteenth century, a Dutch sea captain traveled around Europe exhibiting a rhinoceros named Clara. In McCully's genial version of this odd little chapter in history, illustrated with decorative watercolors, she imagines a loving relationship between Captain Van der Meer and "Clarakin." An afterword acknowledges our era's shift in consciousness ("Clara lived in a time before people understood her needs"). Resources.

For a period of seventeen years in the mid-eighteenth century, a Dutch sea captain traveled around Europe in the company of a rhinoceros named Clara, exhibiting her in market towns and royal courts and coping with the logistical problems of a living exhibit that weighed three tons. McCully's version of this odd little chapter in history is genial. In decorative watercolors we see luscious costumes and extravagant wigs against a backdrop of the Rhine River, the Roman Coliseum, and Versailles, with the focus of everyone's gaze a large gray-brown creature, smiling and patient. McCully imagines a loving relationship between Captain Van der Meer and the rhino he comes to call Clarakin. In an afterword she acknowledges a shift in consciousness between Van der Meer's time and our own ("Today, we know that confining and exhibiting a wild animal is inhumane. But Clara lived in a time before people understood her needs"), but the tone of the narrative itself is warm and joyful. We see the cart in which Clara traveled, but we never see her caged or hobbled. The overall story, if a little lacking in tension and narrative arc, captures the sweetness of a gentle giant. This would pair nicely with Judith St. George's Zarafa: The Giraffe Who Walked to the King or A Giraffe Goes to Paris by Mary Tavener Holmes and John Harris. sarah ellis