BookBrowse Reviews The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel

BookBrowse:

In Ramona Ausubel's offbeat third novel, a widowed scientist and her two teenage daughters embark on a rogue plan to make history by resurrecting an extinct species.

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"In the Age of Extinction, two tagalong daughters traveled to the edge of the world with their mother to search the frozen earth for the bones of woolly mammoths." That opening paragraph of The Last Animal establishes not just the premise of Ramona Ausubel's third novel, but also the environmental outlook, the characters' family dynamic and the quirky combination of cosmic and domestic concerns. A winsome sister duo is at the heart of this unusual and timely story; the book prioritizes the points of view of teenagers Eve and Vera, who are 15 and 12 when the book opens and 17 and 14 by the end. They've had to grow up into independence suddenly, and they bring quick-witted sarcasm to weighty subjects like climate breakdown and bereavement that might otherwise have become depressing.

One year before, the girls' evolutionary anthropologist father, Sal, died in a car accident. Their mother, Jane, is a graduate student in paleobiology, and as a single mother has to try that much harder to be taken seriously in her field. The family's luck looks set to change when, during Jane's summer of field research in Siberia, Eve and Vera find a baby mammoth corpse in thawing permafrost. But Jane's male colleagues quickly take the credit, and back at UC Berkeley, her ideas are stolen and her contributions diminished. (Eve and Vera are distressed to learn from Jane that this is a commonplace situation for women in science.)

Using DNA extracted from the frozen mammoth, Jane's lab creates embryos that blend traits of the woolly mammoth with those of a modern elephant. At a science museum gala, Jane meets a rich Englishwoman named Helen who, with her retired veterinarian husband, George, keeps a private zoo in Italy. They have an elephant they are willing to offer as a surrogate mother. Jane steals a few embryos from the lab and travels to Milan for the transfer. When she flies home a few days later, she fully expects the transfer to fail and to never hear from Helen again. Instead, news comes that the elephant is pregnant and, against all odds, 18+ months later, a baby elephant with fur is born.

Back-breeding to accomplish the de-extinction of a species (see Beyond the Book) is within the realm of possibility, but feels far-fetched here because the action is condensed so that everything happens very quickly and without the clinical oversight usually needed for such complicated procedures. Ausubel has wisely chosen not to dwell on the scientific details, yet that means that this becomes more like speculative fiction or a fairy tale, instead of the realistic novel that readers might be expecting. For instance, when the family returns to Italy for Jane to look after the newborn mammoth (whom she names Pearl), Eve and Vera borrow Helen's ball dresses and jewelry to attend a fancy party thrown for George — it's as if a sort of twisted Cinderella scenario has taken hold.

The sisters' banter is a highlight of the novel: "'I feel like deranged Girl Scouts,' Eve said. 'What patch will we earn today?' 'The Extinct Animal Resuscitation Patch?' Vera suggested." They wrestle the bizarre happenings of their lives into wry stories where each line starts alternately with "Fortunately" and "Unfortunately." Although they employ different coping mechanisms — sex for flighty Eve, baking for serious Vera — both girls are fatalistic. But based on things I've heard my teenage niece and nephews say, their pessimistic outlook seems authentic:

"Eve's stated position on the climate crisis was: we're screwed, might as well have fun with what's left."

"Vera felt betrayed. She was angry at the earth, at this place that was so clearly not a suitable home and would get worse as time went on."

A problem with focusing on the teenagers is that Jane is not as well developed. She's portrayed as a grieving, weary, overworked, and overlooked middle-aged woman — at only 38! — and becomes obsessed with Pearl, treating the mammoth like her own baby. Trapped in mothering clichés, she never soars as a scientist in her own right. This may be the very (age-old) point Ausubel wishes to make about the difficulty of balancing motherhood and career, but I found it a little disappointing. It's also one of my pet peeves for an animal in a book to mostly serve as a metaphor — here, of hubris or a futile striving against the forces of entropy and extinction.

Ironically, this fabulist-leaning novel is best when it is most realist, documenting struggles with bereavement, sexism and parenting teenagers. Set against the backdrop of overwhelming environmental loss, these everyday challenges are somehow all the more relatable.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in April 2023, and has been updated for the April 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.