Jane said, “If we go, we can visit the iceman. Which is as close as we can get to visiting your dad.”
Vera was helpless against this. She looked at her hands, small and pale. She did not know what they would reach for in her life, what they would make or take apart. Now, at thirteen, the only thing she wanted to touch was the only thing she couldn’t.”
“What happened it not, according to science, yet possible. I’ve got my invisibility lady cloak and a story that couldn’t be true.”
Ramona Ausubel’s The Last Animal (Riverhead Books 2023) is one of the best books I’ve read of the year and no one seems to be talking about it. This novel of a single mother and her daughters is what I was hoping to get with The Wilderwomen (my biggest disappointment of 2022). It’s Lessons in Chemistry meets Once There Were Wolves meets Jurassic Park, mixed with a good dose of grief, teenage smart assery, and magic. I loved it.
Vera and Eve didn’t want to spend their summer in the Artic with their mom, but they didn’t exactly have a choice. Recently widowed and struggling for recognition in a male-dominated field, Jane brought her daughters with her to the Artic on a scientific expedition to find out more about the mammoth; she’s struggling with the loss of her husband, being a single mom of teenagers, and clawing for a foothold in the scientific world. The teenagers find a perfectly preserved baby mammoth in the permafrost, rendering the expedition a success but somehow the men still manage to regulate Jane to the background. The inequities continue when the trio return to the States. As fate would have it, the three meet an intoxicating and mystifying rich woman with an exotic animal farm in Italy. What begins as a comment made in jest results in Jane stealing mammoth embryos from the lab and flying to Italy where the stolen mammoth embryos are implanted in the woman’s “pet” elephant.
It’s a story of science and magic and wonder. It’s also about feminism and conservationism. But it’s also a story of unfathomable grief of losing a father, of the untethered existence of the suddenly widowed, of a broken family who doesn’t know how to fill the hole – not until the liquid eyed woolly mammoth baby is born against all odds.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 