This is a perfect travel book: easy reading, interesting characters, a bit of history, and delightful details of two giraffes. Narrated by Woodrow Wilson Nickel, a centenarian living out his last days in a VA home, the story is a recollection–scribbled into multiple notebooks–of his time with two giraffes. He was just 17 when he was orphaned by dust, fleeing the Texas panhandle with all of its death and destruction and arriving in NYC seeking work and food and a cousin he’d never met. 

But before he gets a chance at starting over, the Great Hurricane of 1938 hits the Eastern Seaboard, including a boat carrying two giraffes destined for the San Diego Zoo. So this is the story of young Woodrow, walloped on a NYC dock only a few weeks into his post dust bowl life–sobbing, starving, and soaked–mesmerized by two giraffes that survived the ocean and are unloaded to a special truck for their journey West. Somehow he knows he’s meant to be with those giraffes, and his own journey of growing up begins alongside them. 

Though this is not great literary writing, I really enjoyed the scenes where the giraffes and the humans seem to emotionally connect, which sometimes happens when they’re relaxed and nibbling from the trees, but it also happens when they’re in a panic or threatened, and they allow the humans to calm them, through giraffe-speak or onions or neck massages. 

The other aspects of powerful writing occur through Woody’s flashbacks with the dust storms that “blew three hundred million tons of topsoil off Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas… blackening the skies so bad that your hand in front of your face went unseen… cough by cough, my baby sister and my mom began to die of the dust pneumonia…each year brought more.”

By the end of the novel we understand the power of dust’s destruction, we get a glimpse into the build-up of World War II, we see the Hoovervilles popping up all over, we feel the starvation and hopelessness of so many Americans, but we also experience the beauty and hope that come from two giraffes mesmerizing everyone on their cross country journey. For some, that hope is enough to carry them through another day.