Excerpt from The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

While the travelers checked in, the professor and Todd had a loud conversation about three-pointers in relationship to wingspan in the NBA. The professor said, "Who wants a drink?" Jane said, "It's morning and I have children."

"Go, go," Vera said. "We will sleep."

"If you sleep now you'll never get onto the right time. You'll ruin the entire trip."

The desk clerk handed Jane her key. It was old-fashioned and had a giant wooden block for a key chain. These were the moments when careers took shape. Trust was earned over jet-lag vodka.

Jane said, "Go walk, girls," and motioned her sleepy daughters outside.

"Alone? In a foreign land?" Eve said.

"It's good for you."

Outside, Eve told Vera, "I've never hated anyone so much in my life." The day cracked at them with its light.

"Dudes, ugh," Vera said, shaking her head.

"Mom abandoned us just now. Don't blame men when it was clearly her choice to make."

Vera said, "She had to. The patriarchy, and stuff?" She looked at her watch as if it could set her right, as if knowing the time would clarify the moment. The watch had belonged to her father, not fancy, a drugstore purchase, but precious because it had been on his wrist and had been a tool for mapping his life. Vera could not get the numbers to make sense.

Everyone on the street was dressed well, especially the women, all looking as if they were about to be photographed. The backdrop was bloc and bland, buildings as storage for lives.

"Americans are such slobs," Vera said. "I am basically wearing jammies and I felt proud that I brushed my teeth and hair sometime yesterday. What are we doing here again?"

Eve said, "That's easy. Mom is pretending to be a necessary part of an important project and not a token woman with both literal and emotional baggage. I can see the headline, Woman, Supposed to Be Invisible, Brings Obnoxious Children on Science Trip, Ruins Everything. Couldn't she have sent us to sleepaway camp? I'd have been a counselor and made out with boys behind the mess hall and gotten in big trouble and learned to paddle a canoe. Instead, this."

Vera said, "We won't ruin anything. Look at us being invisible and out of the way so that the adults can drink vodka in preparation to look for ancient mammoth bits to better understand the genetic code and use that information to edit Asian elephant cells until they act like woolly cells. Plus, tour the future home for de-extincted woolly mammoths. That's a summer well spent."

"Listen to you, little lady. You sound better than Mom."

"I have heard her say that ten thousand times. It's embedded in my brain, like a phone number."

"To making a mammoth," Eve said, holding an invisible glass aloft, toward streetlights strung up on a wire.

They cheered with their fists. "Except I think we're supposed to say 'cold-adapted elephant.'"

Eve said, "How completely lame."

"They don't want to be criticized for playing God."

"You know the professor dreams of snuggling up to a woolly of his own making."

Couples sat on benches and the girls walked across a bridge over a wide, shallow river. The bridge was covered in padlocks. Names were written on the locks. Hearts and arrows and the word "Love" in English.

At the other end of the bridge a worker in a green zip-up jumpsuit cut locks, one by one. He knelt, brought the bolt cutter into place and squeezed. The locks that did not fall into the river were kicked in by the worker, each one sounding a different note as it fell into the water.

Love and declarations of love lasted however long, and then they sank.

"Do you think the grown-ups are drunk yet?" Vera asked. "Drunk enough that we can sneak past the bar and go to sleep?" She looked to her big sister for permission.

Eve said, "All I care about is a bed. I am willing to risk my life for it."

Vera did not know what she was willing to risk her life for. Science, progress, comfort, love, sleep.

Excerpted from The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel. Copyright © 2023 by Ramona Ausubel. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.