Nonfiction Monday

Maggie: Alaska’s Last Elephant by Jennifer Keats Curtis relates this true story for ages 4-9 in a narrative nonfiction story that is rich with sensory imagery.

Beginning with Maggie’s arrival at the Alaska Zoo as a baby, the story focuses on her life following the loss of her friend, Annabelle, an Asian elephant. With Maggie’s only companion gone, she adopts a tire for company. Despite the zoo keepers’ best efforts, loneliness and the pervasive cold eventually take a toll and her health declines.

 Fortunately, the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in California already had two groups of elephants and were ready and willing to give this lonesome elephant a new home. How do you move and 8,000-pound animal? Slowly and carefully as it turns out and with a lot of help.

Young readers will enjoy discovering important information about elephants, and the remarkable details of Maggie’s rescue in this child-friendly and beautifully illustrated text.

Curtis does an excellent job of describing the sequence of events that result in Maggie finding a happy new life with her own special friends. And there are plenty of elephant-related facts to absorb along the way.

 The book concludes with a section titled: For Creative Minds, which provides additional reading on Elephant Herds, Zoos, and A Question and Answer section with Maggie’s keeper Michelle Harvey.

A 30-page cross curricular Teaching Activity Guide is available online. The book is also available in Spanish.