The One and Only Ruby

Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ruby is a story in verse for 8 year olds, told by a young elephant who has more than one name.

What happens

Ruby lives at a wildlife park with her aunts. Uncle Ivan is a gorilla. Uncle Bob is a dog who insists he isn't a pet, he's a service dog providing the service of being charming.

Ruby is the littlest elephant, which means she has a lot of fans. She is not bragging. It's just a fact.

Then a man in a baseball cap turns up at the visitors' wall and calls her something nobody at the park ever calls her. Duni. One of her old names, from Africa.

Jabori looked after her when she was a tiny orphaned baby, back at the place where elephants without a herd were sent. He's the one who gave her that name.

She trumpets and dances and pinches his hat off his head with her trunk, the way she always used to. It's brilliant.

And then, a bit later, she starts crying and can't work out why.

That's really what the book is. Uncle Ivan asks her to tell them about Africa, and Ruby starts talking, and she doesn't stop.

Her way of putting things is lovely. Trunk-trudging is when you plod along extra slowly because you've been asked to do something annoying. Floppy-running is the happy opposite. There's a thing called a Tuskday she has to practise for.

The verse matters here. The lines are short and there's white space all over every page, so it goes down far easier than the page count suggests. If your reader has just moved up to longer books and finds a solid block of text off-putting, this is a very kind way in.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that Ruby is an orphan and the book doesn't tiptoe around it. She grew up in an orphanage for elephants. Seeing Jabori again brings the sad memories back with the happy ones, and she's in tears about it within the first few pages.

If your reader finds animals losing their mothers hard going, that will be a lot for them. If they're the sort who wants to know exactly how a rescued animal came to be rescued, Ruby tells it herself, and she has Ivan and Bob sitting with her the whole time she does.

What to read next

Applegate has another animal telling her own story in the library. Odder is a sea otter off the California coast, all daredevil showing off, until the morning a hungry great white changes things.