In The Last Animal, award-winning novelist Ramona Ausubel (Awayland) tells the wondrous and tender 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 may or may not be possible after death, and the equally fantastical experience of becoming a woman in a world of men.
The world of The Last Animal is both strikingly recognizable and yet laced with magic, a place where things Ausubel's characters can barely imagine exist just beneath the surface of everyday life, and yet the things they want most remain ever out of reach. Such a world--which balances on the edge of magical realism--combined with Ausubel's quietly evocative prose gives the novel a perpetual sense of longing. This longing, in Ausubel's descriptions, is often housed in the body. A formless yearning means a character's "feet and fingers itched. She felt bitten. She ached," just as love "jag[s] through [her] like an electric storm." Like this world's magical elements, feelings that go beyond articulation find expression in the tangible, the scientific, the biological.
While Ausubel's world is captivating, it is her core characters, and particularly sisters Eve and Vera, that make The Last Animal memorable. Their dynamic is natural but never simplistic, reflected in how they speak to each other with a frankness of emotion that they don't share with others. And though Eve, Vera and Jane's relationships all shift over the course of the novel, there is a continuity of feeling that grounds the reader in Vera's perspective, in particular. Vera's ongoing sense of being both an essential piece of her sister's life and yet always on its outskirts captures the novel's overall commitment to what it means to be on the fringes, able to see things others can't but never fully incorporated into the whole. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: A fascinating exploration of a family fighting to find themselves and each other after encountering the unknown, The Last Animal is a vulnerable meditation on what binds us.