The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel could easily be titled The Last Family because it’s about a mother and her teenage daughters trying to keep it together.
Jane is a paleo biologist, whose husband died in a car accident a year ago. Eve and Vera are 15 and 13, but wiser than most kids their age. This is, in part, due to their strong bond with each other and to tagging along with their parents on scientific expeditions around the world.
The novel is rich with humor and pathos as the trio treks to Siberia, Iceland and a private animal refuge in Northern Italy. As Jane becomes increasingly disappointed in her ability to be heard/seen as a legitimate scientist, the girls assume responsibility for her care. Grief fills all three as they move forward with their lives while making scientific and personal discoveries.
Part of which involves Jane’s theft of genetically-created embryos of a woolly mammoth, which are clandestinely inseminated into an elephant at the Italian refuge.
What ensue are questions of ethics, sexism and a family struggling for some semblance of normalcy. The latter is particularly difficult given the possibility of introducing an extinct prehistoric animal to the modern world.
Eve and Vera are remarkable characters even if, at times, difficult to consider realistic because they’re wise beyond their years, self-aware teens. They have enough sense to be skeptical of what the future holds, yet are naïve enough to hope for the best – attitudes worth emulating at any age.
The Last Animal
Four Bookmarks
Riverhead Books, 2023
278 pages
The Blue Page Special 