The One and Only Ivan: A Gentle Friendship Story About Patience, Kindness, and Everyday Adventures Together

This is by far one of the BEST children’s books I read as an adult. Sad, heartbreaking, joyful, playful, full of hope. It makes you sit down and read and read until you get to the very end and find out what it means to have courage and believe in yourself. Rooting for Ivan, Stella, Ruby and Bob is so heartwarming from beginning to the end.

This book won the Newbery Medal for Children's Literature in 2013, and it was much deserved. Here's what the book has going for it: 1. The Targeted age of the reader: In recent years people have complained that the Newbery Medal was being awarded to books that were for an older demographic, like older teenagers. I'm not sure I agree with that, because when you read the earlier Newbery Medal books you can tell by the vocabulary and subject matter that the intent has always been for these books to enrich the young reader regardless of age. With that said, Ivan is a book that has a slightly younger age group in mind. Which is important as it will introduce the young reader to great stories spurring them on to try to read more Newbery Medal books. 2. The story is based on a true story. Ivan was real! The main parts of the story are true. This would be a great school book for a young, say 5th grade, class to read, and then research the true story. A simple Google search will turn up all kinds of information about the real Ivan, pictures and all. In turn this information could be used in projects and presentations. 3. I love the characters! I truly enjoyed getting to know every character presented in the story. From the animals to the humans, each one has a great personality that I really enjoyed. My two favorite characters were the young girl, Julia and the dog, Bob. The author could easily write more books about Ivan, and Julia and Bob. 4. The illustrations are nice, and very contemporary. What I didn't Like: 1. The book is separated out, but not into chapters. I wish she had done that. I really felt a "Charlotte's Web" vibe to this book. The plot and characters have some similarities that just made the book overall enjoyable to read. I recently heard that Disney has bought the movie rights to this story, and I hope that's correct. It would make a great movie!

This story is very heartfelt on building your own loved ones into an often unique family. I bought my 10 yr old granddaughter a copy and she had come up with the idea of reading good books together across the many miles we are apart. So we chat long distance on our reads. It is extra special to me that it was her idea to have our own book club discussing this and other good books. Now on to our next fourth great book. This book is thoughtful on animals in low level sideshow type captivity and finding a real home with the other animals and the good caregiver and his daughter. We both enjoyed our time with Ivan. Now half the adult family wants to read our next book and discuss. It is also fun to find a new book and send her our next read. It is fun to find top books for age appropriate fun. The other new family members can join us but they get to buy their own copies!

Good for 10 year olds

This is book #7 on my Recommended By Friends list! Another one of my favorite people, who doesn’t get to read “grown up” books, wasn’t going to play along when I asked for recs. As a mom and a teacher, I knew she’d still have some solid books for me, even if they are labeled for kids!! With a few ideas to pick from, I remembered this title right off the bat. She’d mentioned it before, and her family even went to ‘meet’ Ivan!! So I knew this was the one. In the beginning, I was all happy learning about Ivan and his friends - Stella, Bob, Julia, even the Macaw named Thelma!! I love that Bob is not a fan of people, but lets Julia close. Ivan sleeps with a stuffed gorilla every night, a gift from Julia, that he named Not-Tag after his sister. And Ivan’s an artist!! Who sometimes eats his crayons!! But then it gets really depressing. A new baby elephant comes. She’s malnourished and seems to have been tortured. Mack is an awful human who doesn’t get Stella the help she needs. Then he continues to torture Ruby by bolting her foot to the floor. I do not like this man!! Ivan paints a billboard size picture of Ruby in a zoo for Julia to see. Thanks to her & George, it brings a ton of attention, protestors, inspections. Things happen fast after that, and the zoo people come to get the animals to a better place. At the zoo, Ivan is alone. But then he is slowly introduced to a gorilla family, which will be his own. It’s sweet. And then Julia and Bob come to visit!! This is a beautiful story about a real silverback who had a horrible first half of his life. I love the truth to it, as well as the fictional bits to turn it into a chapter book for the kiddos.

When my 11-year-old finished reading this novel, his first statement was, “I LOVED that book!” With an endorsement like that and because it was the first instance where he ‘stopped time,’ I had to read the book too. A copy of the author’s Newbery Medal acceptance speech is at the back of my copy of The One and Only Ivan. In it, the author says,” We live in a world where children are bullied into despair and even suicide; where armed guards in a school hallway are considered desirable; where libraries are padlocked because of budget cuts; where breakfast and backpacks, for too many children are unaffordable luxuries.” “What makes children better than the rest of us is that they are buoyant, unrepentant optimists.” As a writer, reader, and lover of words, I make it a habit to ‘stop time’ whenever I come across sparkling phrases that deserve homage. A ‘stop time’ is where we stop whatever we are doing to read out loud and to listen; we listen to both the author’s words and to what made that phrase so meaningful to the reader. Although my son and I read the same book, our reactions to it were as different as a carefree stroll through the park and being caught in a traffic snarl in the city at rush hour. Where my son delighted in the animal conversations, I sobbed. Pixar uses humor with double meaning brilliantly in their storytelling. Katherine Applegate uses the same technique, but in a more realistic vein. I sobbed because the adult world my son will live in doesn’t have easy answers. It isn’t colorful, silly, and happy all the time. The innocence of his childhood is beginning to seep away. While Ivan and Ruby soothe each other and tell stories to help them sleep, the author communicates the ache of loneliness, coping skills, feeling boxed in, and the power that is found when helping a friend…or your own child. The first ‘stop time’ that my son called happened when Ivan makes an impossible promise to Ruby, the baby elephant. I’ve been waiting and watching for this moment. A maturity level that notices deeper concepts. An opportunity to share family ideals and values. An easing into the world of adulthood – or at least into the turbulent teens. “Children know all about sadness,” comments Applegate in her speech. “We can’t hide it from them. We can only teach them how to cope with its inevitably and to harness their imaginations in search for joy and wonder.”

My grandson was reading this story for school and I decided to check it out for myself. I found it totally enjoyable and Generally uplifting with a smattering of sadness. It features Ivan, a silverback gorilla captured as a youth and brought to the US, ultimately landing in a small, underfunded mall just off Hwy-95. Ivan is a gentle, rather philosophical soul with distant memories of his old home and a pervasive touch of sadness just under the surface. He is an artist at heart, a passion he shares with Julia, the young daughter of the mall maintenance man. In addition to Julia, Ivan's friends are Stella, an adult elephant with a permanently damaged leg, Bob, a stray dog wise in the ways of the world and who likes to sleep on Ivan,s belly and Ruby, a baby elephant who is purchased by the mall owner and brought into the mall about mid story. The narrative centers around the closeness and empathy between the four animals and Julia. Stella realizes she is very sick and gets Ivan to promise that he will take care of Ruby in the event she can no longer do it. Ivan develops a plan that ultimately enables him to keep his promise to Stella to the benefit of all concerned. Along the way the reader is made to empathize with the plight of animals taken from their natural habitats to live in the artificial confines provided by their captors and to understand that there is significant commonality in the feelings, need, fears and even mortality of all living creatures, Homo sapiens included. I thoroughly enjoyed this reading experience and look forward to discussing the story with my grandson.

I'd heard so many good things about this book that I was eager to read it. And now that I have I have to agree with the wonderful things that I've been hearing. I loved it. Not only was the writing lyrical and beautiful to read, but the characters were heart-warming and sweet. The story revolves around Ivan, a silverback gorilla who lives in a mall where he performs with other animals in a small circus-like show. His best friends are a small stray dog named Bob and a former circus elephant named Stella. Their pretty routine life is interrupted with the arrival of a baby elephant named Ruby. Stella is determined that Ruby will not spend her life in a cage and so Ivan promises to help Ruby get out of this dead-end life. But how on earth is he going to do it? He is after all just a gorilla, or is he? This is definitely a story that makes you go, "ahhh" afterwords. But I personally love happy endings however realistic or unrealistic they may be. One needs to keep in mind however that this is animal FANTASY and as such is bound to have elements that are more believable than others. I prefer however to give the characters the benefit of the doubt and animals are much better at communicating than we as humans sometimes believe. As for intelligence, I've long believed that animals are far more intelligent than they are often given credit for. Plus, I love animals stories, so for me I found the story more than believable enough and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. This one would make for great shared reading as well. I can't recommend this one highly enough.

Wonderful book for kids. Well packaged and delivered promptly.

Splendido libro per bambino . Rilegato bene , caratteri grandi e la storia è entusiasmante . Consigliato per i bimbi . Niente da dire .

Wonderful fast easy poignant read for adults and kids 8 yrs and up.

To be 100% honest, it was not for the positive reviews that I started reading this book, but for the negative ones: there is a particular review about "how this book made my infant child cry..." and I confess, a child's book with the potential to make you cry is everything I look for when reading. To my delight, the writing on this book is rather rich in content, yet economical in its words, just like the gorilla Ivan would want it. This book is a masterpiece in its simplicity, with its rather wit vocabulary and, at the same time, simple word games, the end may not have exceeded my expectations, but those are really hard to meet, and yet I know, what I read couldn't be any different from what is written here, otherwise, it wouldn't be honest

Compré este libro para mis hijos (de 10 y 12 años). Yo lo empecé a leer y no lo pude soltar! Es un cuento hermoso de un Gorila (Ivan) que vive en una jaula en un centro comercial. Ivan no recuerda su vida fuera de su jaula y desde ahi acepta su alrededor y trata de entender a los humanos. Pero algo pasa y los cambios llegan. Ivan es el que cuenta el cuento asi que el vocabulario que usa es muy simple pero al mismo tiempo muy profundo. Es un excelente libro para toda la familia.