The One and Only Ivan

Ivan is a silverback gorilla who narrates his own story from a cramped glass enclosure at the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade, where he has lived on display for the better part of his life alongside Stella, an aging circus elephant, and Bob, a stray dog who sneaks in most nights to sleep curled against Ivan's stomach. Ivan has made a quiet peace with captivity, filling his days with finger painting for tourists and doing his best not to remember the jungle he was taken from as an infant, until Stella grows sick from an untreated leg wound and, before she dies, makes Ivan promise to find her replacement, a baby elephant named Ruby, a better life than the mall can offer either of them. Stella's death and Ruby's arrival pull Ivan out of his own long numbness, and he begins painting again with real purpose, working toward a picture of the words home and free that Julia, the mall janitor's young daughter, understands and posts publicly. The painting sparks outside attention and eventually an investigation into the mall's conditions, and by the book's end the mall closes for good, with Ivan and Ruby relocated to a real zoo, where Ivan meets other gorillas for the first time since he was a baby, and Bob going home with Julia as her pet.

Applegate writes entirely in Ivan's own spare, first person voice, and the sentences are short and imagistic in a way that suits the character's limited human vocabulary and his very unlimited interior life. The book reads quickly, often in a single sitting, and its quiet devastation, an animal who has learned to want almost nothing so that losing nothing will hurt less, lands harder for how plainly it is told rather than how loudly.