Title: Ella the Elegant Elephant
Author: Carmela and Steven D’Amico
Illustrator: Carmela and Steven D’Amico
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2004
Number of pages: 49
Tags: Adventure, Animals, Family, Fiction, Friendship, Picture Book, Grace Sheley
Genre: Fiction
This story takes place in a fictional land called Elephant Islands and introduces a young elephant, Ella, who is nervous about her first day of school in a new town. She finds a hat that her grandmother left for her, a big floppy sunhat, that she decides to wear to school, but is ridiculed by her classmates for being different. The school bully, Belinda, throws a ball on top of the wall separating the school’s playground from a large cliff and tells Ella to retrieve it. Ella refuses and instead suggests that Belinda retrieves the ball if she’s so brave. Belinda accidentally falls off of the ledge and Ella saves her by a magical accident in which suddenly her hat becomes a large parachute. The next day at school, everyone was wearing a big, floppy hat like Ella’s and everyone loves and accepts her.
The text raises the issue of bullying in school and how to deal with it. It is questionable that Ella fires back that Belinda ought to prove her bravery by retrieving the ball herself instead of going to report the incident to a teacher. The text does a good job of showing how Ella does not compromise herself to appease her classmates. Despite being mocked her first day, she continues to wear her hat because she knows that it means something to her personally; this provides a positive message of remaining true to oneself and not sacrificing parts of your personality just to fit in.
The illustrations are vibrant, colorful, and playful. There are bolder lines, but not dark or heavy. The illustrations look as though they were created with a crayon or colored pencil due to the soft colors and shading. The page that introduces Ella depicts her staring out a window, placed on the right side of the page: a picture book code that communicates she is insecure. The final page, where Ella believes that things at school are going be okay, pictures Ella in the center, smiling and looking directly at the audience. In illustrations depicting Ella and her mother, Belinda, or the teacher, Ella is much smaller than the other characters, showing that she feels less powerful or in control than these characters. The images sometimes assist the text, for example, one page’s text merely describes that Ella tripped, but the illustration shows that Belinda had actually tripped her.
