It is the midst of the Great Depression. Woodrow Wilson Nickel (Woody) lost his family in the Dust Bowl in Texas. He made his way up to New York City to live with his unfriendly cousin. But then a raging hurricane came through, killing his cousin. Woody is hurt, and has just figured out he's on his own, when he sees the giraffes on the dock. One of the giraffes is hurt as well. Woody learns the giraffes are going to be trucked across the country to the San Diego Zoo. Woody decides to follow them to California, the land where dreams come true.
Eventually Woody ingratiates himself with the "old man" in charge of transferring the giraffes, and he becomes the driver. They have many adventures, including being followed by a young woman Woody calls "Red" who says she is taking pictures for Life magazine. Woody is enamored with Red, and she is a pretty large part of the story.
This story is told from far in the future when Woody is over one hundred years old and about to die in a nursing home. He is desperately writing down this story from his childhood. He wants it to get to someone. I think this is supposed to make the story more meaningful, but it didn't do much for me.
I found this book occasionally interesting, and I like that the author was trying to bring awareness and appreciation for the animals that we are constantly losing through habitat destruction and climate change. In addition, it is true that two giraffes were trucked across the country after surviving a hurricane, which was the inspiration for Rutledge's story. Finally, Rutledge touches on real aspects of The Dust Bowl, how it was affecting people, and how desperate it was.
However, reading this book was primarily a frustrating experience. I often found the descriptions lacking, and many of the events seemed unbelievable. I never had a good idea of what the truck looked like or how it worked. The situations they got in felt absurd and impossible. Both people and animals acted and reacted in ways that did not make sense to me. I often felt physics was not being taken into account in many of these situations.
For example, the old man has a hand that is so mutilated he cannot drive. But when the giraffe starts choking on a hat, he grabs a hose and climbs up the side of the truck. That's problematic enough because that would be challenging with two good hands. But then he sticks the hose down the giraffe's throat and the hat comes back up??? I don't see how waterboarding a giraffe is going to help a choking situation. And even if that was somewhat possible, I imagine you'd need some pretty intense water pressure to do anything--although that pressure is going down on the hat, so I still don't see how it would work.
In addition, as far as I can tell from the internet, giraffes do not "caterwaul." The most I could find is something that sounded kind of like a growl when a mother giraffe was fighting with lions over its baby. I could go on for quite a while with things that were unrealistic or not described well enough to feel realistic. Red's car bumped the big giraffe truck at 5 mph, and suddenly the truck is leaning over the edge of a cliff. Later, Red somehow uses her car to keep the truck from tipping over in a flood. I had no understanding of how these things were physically happening.
I was also disappointed in the ending. Red was a pioneering woman who traveled across the country on her own. Except that we got no actual details of her journey. And in the end, she loses all of her pictures in a flood, she's pregnant, and she very quickly dies of heart problems. What a lame journey for her character. Even Woody is frustrating. He finally gets the giraffes to San Diego, but he doesn't even see them settled. Instead he steals another motorcycle and is forced into the army. This book has thousands of positive Amazon reviews, and many people enjoyed it, including my friend's husband. But I cannot recommend it.
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