- Voice: Danny DeVito, a casting the publisher blurb pitches ahead of the plot.
- Big ideas: friendship and found family, animal welfare, a lost sibling, a storm that scatters everyone.
- Atmosphere: Warm and brisk, with a real hurricane in the middle of it.
- Worth it?: A short, affectionate sequel that assumes you have already met Ivan.
Catch up with these beloved friends before the star-studded film adaptation hits theaters in August 2020, reads the promotional copy still attached to this audiobook. The sentence has aged into an accidental time capsule, and it says something useful about how the listing was assembled: the blurb was written to sell a tie-in moment that has long since passed, and nobody went back to revise it afterward. What sits underneath that copy is a short children's novel by Katherine Applegate, credited to Danny DeVito as reader, and a review column written mostly by the adults doing the buying.
That gap between the marketing and the record is worth holding onto, because small versions of it keep turning up. The publisher line reads Storytide. The release is dated May 5, 2020. The series field calls this The One and Only and numbers the entry second, while a response posted in January 2026 describes a three book series and leaves it there. None of that damages the novel. It is simply the kind of unresolved detail a listener should notice before deciding which parts of the page to trust.
The story is easy to summarize, and one reviewer already did it better than a marketing department could. Signed by David Park and prefaced with the note that it was reviewed by a nine year old, the response walks the whole plot: Bob the dog goes with his owner Julia to the zoo to see Ruby and Ivan, a bad storm hits, he is separated from all three, he hears his long-lost sister Boss barking and runs off, and he gets home safely. Then the text stops. It stops mid-sentence, at the moment Boss knocks on the door.
Truncation of that kind belongs to the page, not to the book, but it changes what the column can do for you. The most engaged response on the listing is the one you cannot finish reading. The same thing happens to Paul E., who begins by noting that you heard Ivan the gorilla tell his own story first and that Ivan's best bud Bob, a dog, now tells his, and who is partway into an argument about human responsibility in animal treatment when the text runs out.
The Best Parts of The One and Only Bob
Danny DeVito is the reason this recording has a personality, and the publisher clearly agrees: the blurb interrupts its own plot summary to say don't miss the audiobook, read by Danny DeVito, exclamation mark included. That placement is unusual. Publisher copy normally treats the reading as a footnote to the writing, well below the bestseller claims. Here the casting is pitched second, ahead of the story, which tells you it was understood as the selling point and not as a production credit.
At three hours and fifty minutes, this is a compact recording, and for a children's title the length is a practical argument in itself. It fits an afternoon in the car or a short run of bedtimes without the negotiation a much longer book demands from a young listener. Applegate's shape helps too. Paul E. describes a four-part book whose opening section introduces Bob's start and the story's connection to Ivan, Stella, and Ruby, and those seams are clean enough to follow by ear.
Bob narrates himself, which puts the entire weight of the thing on voice. A dog telling you about a hurricane, a zoo, and a sister he lost is a premise that lives or dies on delivery, and a listener who does not take to the reading will not find much structural scaffolding to fall back on. That is a real risk with a distinctive voice actor, and it is also the whole reason to choose the recording over the printed novel.
Before You Commit to The One and Only Bob
Discount the blurb first. It calls The One and Only Ivan soon to be a major motion picture, urges you to catch up before the film reaches theaters, and describes this book as an instant number one New York Times bestseller. All of that was accurate copy at some point. None of it tells you a thing about the recording you would be buying today, so anyone reading the page now has to mentally subtract the entire tie-in layer before the actual product comes into view.
Know going in that this is a sequel and behaves like one. Paul E. establishes exactly that in a first sentence, and the synopsis leans on the earlier novel for its footing, introducing Bob as Ivan's friend before introducing Bob as a character with problems of his own. Whether the recording opens with any recap is not stated anywhere in the description, so a household starting here instead of with Ivan should plan on filling the gap themselves.
One glance at the ratings badge is enough. Five written responses are visible and every one of them is a five, while the badge itself reads 4.8 across twelve ratings. The votes doing the pulling are the ones with no text attached, so the column you can read is not a sample of the population that produced the number. Treat those five for what they describe and not for what they seem to average out to.
Should You Listen to The One and Only Bob?
Households already invested in Ivan are the obvious audience, and the column is unanimous about register: a heartwarming story with life lessons for children and adolescents, an edge of your seat adventure that stays clean and family friendly, in the words of the response signed D. A grandparent writing in January 2026 reports that the grandchildren love the stories, on a parent's authority. That is the tenor throughout, adults relaying a child's verdict, and it is worth reading the column with that filter in place.
Anyone shopping for a first Applegate title should begin with Ivan, and anyone wanting something substantial for a confident older reader will find this slight. It is a dog story with a hurricane in it and a strong emotional core, which Paul E. reaches for directly when pointing at how fast the writing gets to human responsibility for animals, but it is short and makes no claim otherwise.
Give it a pass if you need a recording that stands alone without the earlier novel behind it, and give it a pass if a stale tie-in blurb makes you distrust everything else on the listing. Families who already know Ivan, Ruby, and Bob, and who want a brief car-ride listen with a famous voice on the front, will get precisely what they came for.
