The Last Animal

In The Last Animal, Ramona Ausubel (Awayland) tells the wondrous story of two teenaged daughters and their widowed mother in the aftermath of their father's death. Eve and Vera have always been close, but since their father died, it's felt increasingly like all they have is each other. Their mother, Jane, is doing the best she can, but she's also busy trying to carve out a space for herself in a male-dominated biology field. When Eve and Vera are forced to tag along on their mother's scientific expedition to Siberia, they think it will just be another few months of watching her be patronized by her colleagues. That is, until the girls unearth a rare mammoth, entirely intact, in the permafrost. What follows is a fantastical journey into the kind of life that may or may not be possible after death, and the equally fantastical experience of becoming a woman in a world of men.

The setting of The Last Animal is strikingly recognizable yet laced with magic, a place where things Ausubel's characters can barely imagine exist just beneath the surface of everyday life, but the things they want most remain ever out of reach. This, combined with Ausubel's evocative prose, gives the novel a perpetual sense of longing. Though Eve, Vera and Jane's relationships shift over the course of the novel, there is a continuity of feeling that grounds the reader in Vera's perspective. Her ongoing sense of being both an essential piece of her sister's life and always on its outskirts captures the novel's overall commitment to what it means to be on the fringes. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

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