A Tale Magnolious by Suzanne Nelson

She's an orphan and she hates the home she lives in.  She sneaks out to go town whenever she can.  On this trip she finds they intend to hang an elephant for the death of her trainer.  She knows the elephant isn't guilty, she just knows it.  So she goes up to visit with it and it's kind.  They escape together and run as far as they can in one evening.  They stop to sleep in a barn...

Knopf Books for Young Readers and Edelweiss let me read this book for review (thank you).  It will be published June 18th.

The old man who finds them in the barn isn't very welcoming but he lets them stay.  She sleeps in the barn with the elephant.  She also offers to help him farm.  She has some seeds she stole from the tinker she can plant.  The old man says the dust storms have killed all the other plants.  He rigs up a harness for the elephant and it plows the field.  Then it makes little holes for her to plant her seeds.  The plants grow, she makes a friend from a neighboring farm and they soon discover the Mayor is the one creating the wind storms.  He's a hard man to defeat because everybody in town owes him money (except the old man she lives with) and he can take their farms away from them.

The Mayor is an evil man with plans for the town, his own plans, not from the people who live there.

It comes to a showdown between the Mayor and Nitty, but she has more people on her side than he imagined.

The ending is very exciting and the whole read was fun.  I never knew stealing an elephant could be fun and rewarding!