the one and only ivan by katherine applegate

And not only do I not feel like he’s an artist, I was left unfulfilled when it all of a sudden connected for him. Ivan didn’t feel like an artist but Applegate really needed him to be one. “Unconvincing” is the word I am looking for. And we all know how I feel about telling instead of showing. I had to be told, over and over, that Ivan liked to do art because we never really felt it or were shown it. That is integral to the story, but it felt forced, too. I also remained curious the entire time about Ivan’s connection with art. So, perhaps it was disjointed at the expense of author choice. I didn’t find the poetry true to Ivan’s voice and it’s not like it emerged from the story, either. I don’t seem to have stumbled on a story here that really needed to be poetry. I, on the other hand, really enjoy poetry. Poetry requires a certain appreciation of language itself and with expression as much as story. It is unlikely that my reluctant-reader son will ever fall in love with a poetry novel. It is the second juvenile poetry novel we have read this year (the other being Inside Out and Back Again).

It is a novel, but it is written in freeverse poetry. Ivan is Charlotte, Ruby is Wilbur, and there you have it: one animal does a miraculous thing to get the humans’ attention and save another animal. As a matter of fact, Ivan is remarkably like Charlotte’s Web¸ which hadn’t occurred to me until just now. The reader is expected, like with Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web, to suspend their belief.

In the scope of things, this is not what the book is ultimately about, and it’s fairly ignorable (if you find yourself bothered by it, as I did). It was more like Applegate was proposing that animals really do have the capacities that her characters do. But there was something about The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate that somehow defied both these categorizations and got under my skin. I’m not averse to a story in which animals are personified but being sneaky about it right under the nose of unsuspecting humans. I’m not averse to a story in which animals are personified.

The one and only ivan by katherine applegate