How does one hide an elephant? This is one of the questions facing Hettie Quin in S. Kirk Walsh's intriguing first novel, “The Elephant of Belfast” (2021). Another is, which of three flawed men might be the one for her? Yet another is, how to stay alive when the Germans are bombing Belfast every night?

Hettie works in a private zoo in Belfast in 1940, and she is thrilled when a young elephant, Violet, is placed in her care. She lives with her mother after her father deserted the family and after her older sister died in childbirth. Living with her depressed mother becomes difficult, so Hettie spends more and more time at the zoo.

The men in her life include Liam, her sister's handsome husband, a committed and violent IRA follower whose advances prove hard to resist. Then there is Samuel, who seems charming and sometimes heroic, yet becomes brutish whenever they are alone, and Ferris, a fellow zookeeper who is steady but bland.

As the bombing of the city becomes more severe, Belfast officials fear zoo animals could escape and threaten citizens, and so the police, which now include Samuel on the force, are ordered to kill large predators and even the elephants. Hettie flees with Violet, raising the dilemma of where to hide her.

The novel, based partly on a real person and a true story, proves irresistible, although it seems to end before the story does. What happens to Violet? What happens to Hettie? Does she choose any of those three men? Readers are left with as many questions as they started with? ( )

It is rare that I don't finish a book, but I simply hated the ridiculously long exposition that made the main character look like an idiot for being attracted to a man/boy who had sexually assaulted her on their first date (and tries to once again because she's too stupid to steer clear of him). I never made it to the part of the story that was based on a true story from the Belfast Blitz because I couldn't take anymore of the vacuous main character and the other two-dimensional characters. ( )

There seems to be more WWII fiction around these last few years than ever before — and I’ve read a lot more of it than I ever expected I’d be reading. The problem, for me, is that the books tend to start blending together in my memory after a while because their plots are not really all that different from each other. And that’s exactly the reason I was attracted to S. Kirk Walsh’s The Elephant of Belfast. I figured that a book whose main character was a young female zookeeper who took an elephant home with her during the 1941 Easter Tuesday German bombing raids on Belfast had to stand out from the crowd. Well, it does.

Hettie Quinn is a twenty-year-old zoo volunteer when The Elephant of Belfast begins. The Quinn family has had a rough go lately; Hettie’s father has seemingly abandoned the family for good, and Hettie’s only sister has recently died giving birth to her first child. Now, Hettie lives alone with her mother, and Hettie is in bad need of a distraction, something to take her mind off the family’s recent troubles.

That distraction comes along in the form of Violet, a three-year-old orphaned elephant from Ceylon that has been purchased by Bellevue Zoo & Gardens where Hettie works. From the very first moment Hettie helps to walk Violet from the Belfast docks to the zoo, she is in love. All she can think about, to her mother’s dismay, is Violet. So, when the German bombing raids begin, Hettie is determined to ensure Violet’s survival — even if it means running to the zoo on foot during the raids to make sure that Violet is not being completely terrorized by all the commotion.

As the devastating raids continue, the zoo not only struggles to feed its small collection of exotic animals like Violet, administrators also have to contend with an order from the police to kill off the animals that could be dangerous to the population if they escape during one of the nightly bombing raids. Hettie is having none of it, and with the help from others who feel the same, she leads Violet away before it is too late to save her.

But how do you hide an elephant in a city like Belfast?

Bottom Line: The Elephant of Belfast is about kindred spirits who save each other’s lives. Hettie and Violet meet just when they will most need each other: Hettie, to take her mind off of the utter destruction of property and lives all around her; and Violet, to make sure that she doesn’t starve to death, loose her mind as the bombs are falling, or have to be destroyed because she has become a danger to the traumatized citizens of Belfast. It’s a rather beautiful story, really, one in which the unexpected bonding between man and beast offers the hope and love two very different creatures need if they are going to survive what is happening all around them. ( )

Why this book? Because I love elephants and this book is based on the story of a real elephant. Check out the Q&A Susan @ The Cue Card did with the author and photos of the real elephant!!! --> https://www.thecuecard.com/books/q-a-with-author-s-kirk-walsh/

Based on the true story of Denise Weston Austin, I liked the zoo elements of this story better than the political and personal elements. 20-year old Hettie Quin is working part-time at the Belfast Zoo in the 1940s, when a young elephant Violet (Vi) arrives from Ceylon. Zookeepers at the time were male, and yet she manages to do her job well enough to gain full-time employment and become responsible for the welfare of Vi. Hettie does a great job, with little help, in a challenging time for the zoo, especially when the bombings started and wrenching decisions had to be made to save animals. The other storylines, including her relationship with her mother, estranged father, and widowed brother-in-law were not as polished and the political storyline was particularly weak, especially the competition between the men interested in Hettie. ( )