By Katherine Applegate
A true story about a gorilla that lets grief and hope sit on the same page.
Ivan is a silverback gorilla who has spent twenty-seven years in a glass enclosure at a shopping mall. He mostly doesn't think about it — until a baby elephant named Ruby arrives, and he makes a promise he has no idea how to keep.
Don't let the thickness of it scare either of you off. Ivan tells the whole story in short, spare chapters with a lot of white space on the page, so it reads much faster and easier than it looks. A child who would never pick up a 300-page book can fly through this one. And telling it that way lets the sad, heavy parts land a little at a time instead of all at once, which is exactly why it works for a younger or more tender reader.