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A Novel
by Ramona Ausubel
Book Reviewed by:A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother's scientific expedition. But there's a lot about their lives lately that hasn't been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be so happy either.
Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth, and things finally start to get interesting. The discovery sets off a surprising chain of events, leading mother and daughters to go rogue, pinging from the slopes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, and resulting in the birth of a creature that could change the world—or at least this family.
The Last Animal takes readers on a wild, entertaining, and refreshingly different kind of journey, one that explores the possibilities and perils of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it's like to be a woman in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers.
A winsome sister duo is at the heart of this unusual and timely story. But 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! 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. 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...continued
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
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The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel describes a cutting-edge scientific endeavor to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction by combining its DNA with that of a modern Asian elephant and growing the resulting embryo in an elephant's (or an artificial) womb. The animal that is born will not be genetically identical to a wooly mammoth, but a cold-resistant elephant that would occupy the same ecological niche. Though it sounds like something out of Jurassic Park, there is a similar, real-life project being undertaken by Colossal Biosciences which began in 2021 and is anticipated to be complete by 2027. The theoretical process involved was also described in the 2015 book How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction by Beth Shapiro.
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Jenny Slate, bestselling author of Little Weirds
I loved this book so much. Ramona Ausubel writes with such humor, but also shining intellect and vulnerability. The Last Animal shows the value of taking risks even when the heart is broken, and that sometimes risk brings with it a return to warmth. Gorgeous.
