It’s been a while since I had small fry around, and I’m not much in the habit of reading children’s or YA books these days. But back when I had a captive audience, I remember that we both liked our tales with some edge—a little dark humor, a little melancholy. To this day I can’t hear the words The Snowman without my eyes welling up automatically.

A friend recently sent me Kate DiCamillo’s The Magician’s Elephant (Candlewick Press, 2009) and it was a treat, just the kind of thing that would have been a repeat bedtime read in our house. I very much appreciate her giving me a reason to pick it up. Literally: it’s a small, lovely book with an abstractly old-fashioned feel, and much care was taken with every element. The type and ornaments, the creamy paper stock, and Yoko Tanaka’s sweetly somber illustrations all add up to a beautiful object to hold.

Set in an almost-familiar European village “at the end of the century before last,” The Magician’s Elephant is the story of Peter Augustus Duchene, a brave 10-year-old orphan boy being raised in a drafty attic by an old, slightly senile soldier with a wooden foot. One day a fortuneteller sets up her tent in the market square. In the spirit of good fables everywhere, for the price of the coin meant for that night’s dinner she tells Peter’s fortune, setting him off on a quest to find his long-lost sister Adele, whom he had thought dead. “You must follow the elephant,” the fortuneteller says, “She will lead you there.” When Peter objects, thinking she is making fun of him—there are no elephants in his little corner of 19th-century Europe, not even in a fairy tale—she tells him, “That is surely the truth, at least for now. But perhaps you have not noticed: the truth is forever changing.”

Indeed, that night  a magician accidentally conjures up an elephant. It tumbles through the opera house ceiling, falling on a noblewoman and setting off a chain of events that are, of course, magical. But not only magical: also bittersweet and unsentimental in the kindest way. DiCamillo gives us a fanastic cast: a status-seeking countess who installs the elephant in her ballroom, a crippled stonecutter who laughs bitterly all day, a singing beggar and his blind dog, a kindly, orphanage-managing nun. She obviously loves all her characters, no matter how flawed, and makes each a brilliant tiny reflection on human nature.

After all, every good fairy tale needs a moral: The Magician’s Elephant is about empathy, about going beyond what we see and listening to what people are really saying. When Peter finally comes face to face with the elephant, he stops and looks—really looks—at her. And realizes that she’s not just the instrument of his quest but a creature far from her home and lonely.

And Peter forgot about Adele and his mother and the fortuneteller and the old soldier and his father and battlefields and lies and promises and predictions. He forgot about everything except for the terrible truth of what he saw, what he understood in the elephant’s eyes.

She was heartbroken.

She must go home.

Compassion is an easy enough concept to beat anyone over the head with. But DiCamillo’s touch is feather-light and sure. Connections missed and made are scattered throughout the book, some just a sentence long. But they’re all in there, and I don’t think it will spoil anything to say that consideration and sympathy are, in the end, greatly rewarded. The book itself is a fine reward just to hold and read. Plus it’s never a bad thing to remember that everyone has a story of their own to tell—even, and maybe especially, an elephant.

(The illustration is by Yoko Tanaka for The Magician’s Elephant.)