The Last Animal

November 1, 2022

In Siberia with their scientist mother, Jane, who's part of a team intent on bringing back the woolly mammoth from extinction, teenagers Eve and Vera discover the body of a 4,000-year-old baby mammoth, pristinely preserved. Their discovery upends the contentious team, with Jane suddenly in opposition to her colleagues and deciding to strike out on her own. From PEN Literary/VCU Cabell First Novelist award winner Ausubel.

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Starred review from January 16, 2023
The Ice Age meets the Anthropocene in this gem from Ausubel (Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty), centered on a scientist’s improbable attempt to revive an extinct species. A research trip brings Jane, a recently widowed graduate student, to the permafrost of Siberia, along with her two daughters, Eve, 15, and Vera, 12. Since their father died, Jane has thrown herself into work, and the girls would rather be anywhere than Siberia. Then the miraculous discovery of a baby mammoth preserved in ice brings them together. Back home in San Francisco, Jane shares her discovery with Helen, a glamorous amateur zookeeper who lives with zebras and giraffes on her husband’s estate on Lake Como. Soon, Jane and Helen hatch a plan to impregnate Helen’s pet elephant with a genetically modified embryo based on the baby mammoth’s DNA. Supporting players include a group of beardy professor-scientists in zip-off cargo pants who believe resurrecting the planet’s long-lost megafauna will heal the misdeeds of generations, and an Icelandic boy toy who catalyzes a perfectly reckless moment of teenage rebellion for Eve. Ausubel is at her best when exploring the ties that bind, especially in a family flung into unprecedented circumstances. In charting the parallel worlds of grief, scientific devotion, and adolescence, Ausubel comes up with a seamless global caper that brims with compassion and makes the reader glad to be alive. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow and Nesbit Assoc.

February 1, 2023
Ausubel (Awayland, 2018) returns to her familiar themes, painted across varied landscapes in this transfixing, fabulist tale centering the life-giving power of women within a scientific frame. Vera's mother, Jane, is a recently widowed paleobiology graduate student, older than her peers, having focused on child-rearing during her immediate post-college days. Without her ""job"" supporting her late husband's academic and writing career, Jane ravenously returns to her own pursuits and takes teenage daughters Vera and Eve on far-flung research expeditions, bonding them together through their isolation. While amusing themselves wandering in the Arctic, the girls make the remarkable discovery of intact, infant mammoth remains. This sets in motion daring plans that take the family around the world, dallying with danger, to embark on genetic experiments that could have earthshaking consequences--like a feminist Jurassic Park. The narration, from Vera's young adolescent perspective--though not in her voice--is lush and full of wonder as a family is broken and reshaped, and the women come of age, evolve, and grapple with the limits and conflicts of biology and ambition.

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March 31, 2023

In this latest novel from the award-winning Ausubel (following the story collection Awayland), Jane, a widowed scientist, is traveling to Siberia on a research expedition with teenage daughters Eve and Vera in tow. The discovery by the girls of the remains of a baby woolly mammoth in the melting permafrost sets in motion a cascade of astonishing events. Grieving the loss of her husband and frustrated by the dismissive attitude of the male members of her research team, Jane steals genetic material from the mammoth and implants the embryos in an elephant owned by an eccentric British socialite who lives in a castle in Italy with her husband and their personal menagerie. Meanwhile, Eve and Vera work through adolescence and their own sense of loss, emotionally abandoned by Jane as she focuses on the new being she has created. VERDICT Ausubel grounds the seemingly far-fetched plot by having the characters themselves express wonderment and skepticism as the events unfold. Worldly-wise and cynical, Eve and Vera navigate their unconventional lifestyle by alternately clinging to each other and setting their own boundaries. The family works toward healing in an emotionally authentic way, while the unique plot keeps the pages turning. Recommended for most collections.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2023
After the death of their father, two teens accompany their scientist mom on a globe-trotting quest to save the planet. "It's like they always say, you look down for one week to breed a woolly mammoth and when you look up again your little girls have turned into women." Deadpan gems like this sparkle in just about every scene of Ausubel's fourth volume of highly original fabulist fiction, which marries an extraordinary and slightly bananas scientific adventure with a deeply felt portrait of a mother and daughters healing from terrible loss. Jane married the professor of her ancient humanoids course; their daughters, Vera and Eve, were 11 and 14 when their father plunged to his death in the Italian Alps while driving a cooler full of Neanderthal tissue samples from one lab to another. As the novel opens, a year later, their mom has dragged them to Siberia, where scientists are searching for woolly mammoth bones in service of a theory that bringing back certain extinct species could help reverse climate change. (It makes sense but, unsurprisingly, cannot be summarized in this space.) Bored and fed up, the girls go off for a wander and come back with the frozen, perfectly preserved body of a baby woolly mammoth. Immediately the men on the expedition name it Aleksei and move to claim credit. Back home in Berkeley, their mom meets an eccentric millionaire named Helen who owns a castle and a wild animal preserve on Lake Como in Italy, and the two hatch a plan to take back the wheel on woolly mammoth resurrection. The unfolding story hops to Iceland and then to Lake Como, settings that Ausubel makes magical and fully capable of containing the ever kookier plot. "I am working toward my PhD in weird shit," says Eve, though both girls yearn continually for the ordinary life they lost when their father died. An amazing amount of humor, pizazz, wisdom, and wonder packed into a story that is essentially about processing grief.

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