By Katherine Applegate
Ruby, the baby elephant from Ivan's story, is older now and ready to remember the family she lost in the wild.
Ruby the elephant is safe now, living at a wildlife sanctuary with plenty of room to walk. A ceremony called Tuskday is coming, the day a young elephant is welcomed as a grown-up, and it brings back everything Ruby has spent her whole life keeping quiet: the herd she was born into in Africa, the day the poachers came, and the old elephant who kept her alive before she ever met Ivan and Stella.
Like Ivan, this reads much faster than its page count suggests. Applegate writes short chapters with a lot of white space, so a child who freezes at a thick book can get through it without much trouble. The pull here is Ruby's own voice. She narrates, remembering her mother and her herd so vividly that you stop noticing an elephant is telling the story. There's no magic in it, no talking to people, just an elephant looking back. A child who loved Ivan will come to this the way you check in on an old friend, and it fills in what happened to Ruby rather than retreading the first book.