The Last Animal

Description

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY OPRAH DAILY, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS!

“Whip-smart and compulsively readable. . . both a wildly entertaining adventure story and a meditation on what it means to love your children—fiercely and imperfectly.”—Oprah Daily

“Springs alive to explore questions that stump scientists and families, problems of the head and the heart.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“A full-hearted portrait of sisterhood, family and the ways we process grief. Charming, wry, and original.” —People

TWO SISTERS, ONE MOM, AND ONE WOOLLY SECRET.

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.Praise for The Last Animal:

“I know it’s hard to imagine, but The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel, is like a sweeter, more poignant version of ‘Jurassic Park. . .’ This shaggy elephant story is as much about surviving family grief as it is about living in a world doomed by climate change. And yet, The Last Animal takes flight with all the improbable buoyancy of a pterodactyl.”—Ron Charles, CBS This Morning

“Every family, after all, goes extinct eventually. The paradox that this novel confronts with such tender sympathy and humor is how to love the time we have left.” —The Washington Post

“This extraordinary story hops the globe, combining wild adventures aimed at reversing climate change with a fullhearted portrait of sisterhood, family and the ways we process grief. Charming, wry and original.” —People

“Soars where so many other books about family dynamics simply coast. . . Ausubel brings deep emotional truth to her work of dramatic fiction. . . Splicing wit and wisdom, The Last Animal is a bright-eyed meditation on what animates us, biologically as well as emotionally — but most of all, familially.”—NPR

“Sustained sorrow… underpins Ramona Ausubel’s new novel, The Last Animal. . The book also manages to be a mirthful romp of chicanery and derring-do.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Whip-smart and compulsively readable. . . Surprising, funny, and poignant, The Last Animal is both a wildly entertaining adventure story and a meditation on what it means to love your children—fiercely and imperfectly—in the “Age of Extinction,” a time when their futures appear more tenuous than ever.”—Oprah Daily

“Delightful, poignant and occasionally heartbreaking.”—Good Housekeeping

“Ausubel is a supernaturally gifted writer whose heart, soul, wit and intellect are evident in every wacky setting, character and plot line she weaves. Few authors can do what she does, seemingly effortlessly: spin saucy yet kind-spirited social satire while exploring a multitude of topical and archetypal subjects — all within a single work, all in sentences that sing… Forget everything you think you know about your reading tastes, sink into [Ausubel’s] weird world and prepare to fall in love with a 4,000-year-old baby mammoth.”—LA Times

“A hairy but cuddly beast of a novel that sheds life lessons, some heartwarming, many sticky with sentiment… Ausubel’s conclusion is clear: Nurture the earth and your dreams, but don’t forget to nurture your family.”—Christian Science Monitor

“The Last Animal is a wildly plotted romp as well as a deeply felt story of family, grief, and the hope to be found in continuing to live, even under the cloud of an uncertain future.”—Alta Journal

“A fanciful tale grounded in reality but reaching into the heart of a reader with relatable storytelling about the relationships between two sisters, and between mothers and daughters. . . a delight to read. . .Ausubel has found a great way to combine the complications of climate change and the wonders of the natural world with the difficulties women still face in a field dominated by men. . .The Last Animal provides laughs, chills and celebration in equal measure throughout. It is highly recommended to anyone who loves what fiction can do with its most wondrous, creative and heartfelt possibilities. Ausubel has a total winner here.”—Book Reporter

“Wondrous. . . 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. . .strikingly recognizable yet laced with magic. . .Ausubel’s evocative prose, gives the novel a perpetual sense of longing.”—Shelf Awareness

“Ramona Ausubel is a master at creating distinctive young female characters… [The Last Animal is] an intense portrait of family dynamics that undergirds a speculative narrative that is just on the verge of real, and also filled with hope.”—LitHub

“Ausubel’s fourth volume of highly original fabulist fiction. . .marries an extraordinary and slightly bananas scientific adventure with a deeply felt portrait of a mother and daughters healing from terrible loss. . . .An amazing amount of humor, pizazz, wisdom, and wonder packed into a story that is essentially about processing grief.”—Kirkus, STARRED review

“The Ice Age meets the Anthropocene in this gem from Ausubel. . .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.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“An incredibly sharp and sweeping novel about our modern planet with an intimate emotional core. . .Balancing the breadth and complexity of our ailing ecosystems and the resonant humanity of a grieving family, Ausubel has crafted an unforgettable tale for our time.”—Chicago Review of Books

“[A] transfixing, fabulist tale centering the life-giving power of women within a scientific frame. . . a feminist Jurassic Park. The narration. . .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.”—Booklist

“Ausubel’s new novel has a surprisingly winning combination of subjects. . . .The story. . .easily manages to win our hearts. . .The author’s good-natured humor and wildly imaginative plot create an incredibly appealing read.”—Center for Fiction

“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.”—Jenny Slate, bestselling author of Little Weirds

“I never thought I would fall in love with a wooly mammoth, but without a doubt I did. Here is an unlikely story of family and tenacity, of existence and striving to exist even if you are told you cannot.  The women of this remarkable family astounded me.  They are brilliant, kind, and utterly fearless.  The prose is gorgeous.  Each sentence pulsates with such heart and life.”—Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
 
“The Last Animal is pitch perfect, a phylum of every hurt and want traded between mothers and daughters. I was captivated by the spirit of this tightly-woven story. How magical to consider the world as very large and yet very small all at the same time. A tender, fascinating look into the bruised things that can lay buried inside a family.” —Kristen Arnett, author of With TeethRamona Ausubel is the author of two novels and two story collections, among them Awayland and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, she has been long-listed for the Story Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR’s Selected Shorts, and elsewhere. 
 

1. The Last Animal tells the story of Jane, a female scientist, and her two teenage daughters, Eve and Vera, who engage in a wild scientific experiment—and end up learning about themselves in the process. What preexisting tensions within the family are brought out by this experiment?

2. Eve and Vera have very different personalities and roles in the family but are extremely close. At one point, Vera thinks, “As the first born, it was [Eve’s] job to be the icebreaker ship, plowing through her mother’s good intentions. Fifteen was old enough to brew stronger, higher-value anger. Vera’s version, at thirteen, was only a mixer.” How would you characterize each of them? How much of their personalities, outlooks, and behaviors did you see as being an effect of birth order or past experience? How do their individual personalities shape the story?

3. When the novel opens, the girls’ father, Sal, has been dead for one year. How do Jane, Eve, and Vera’s feelings about Sal’s death evolve over the course of the story? Consider how they each find closure around his loss. What do you think the novel is saying about grief and legacy?

4. The Last Animal unfolds at a research station in the Arctic, an exotic animal farm in Italy, and a frigid coastal enclave in Iceland. Eve’s and Vera’s young lives involve constant travel: “They had grown up on the road, on the move, in countries all over the world. They had been brave, or else they had had no choice.” What does this nomadic life give to Jane and Sal’s daughters, and what does it take away? Consider how the family functions when they are abroad versus when they are home in Berkeley. Which lifestyle do you think is better for them as individuals or as a family?  

5. Helen and George are benefactors of the mammoth experiment, and their largesse is appreciated by Jane and the girls, as well as viewed with suspicion. What are Helen’s and George’s deeper motivations, and when did you begin to suspect them? What do Jane and her daughters learn from Helen about trust and sacrifice?

6. Jane is the only female scientist on her research team. In what ways does her gender hold her back? Do you think this phenomenon is limited to science? What does it mean that Jane’s daughters observe this kind of sexism in action? Do you think Jane would make the same daring choices in response to it all if her daughters weren’t in the picture? 

7. Describe Vera’s relationship with Lars. In what ways does this teenage romance point to shifting dynamics between Eve and Vera? Jane’s reaction to learning that they are dating causes Vera to do something very unusual with the remnants of her father’s research. What do you think she is trying to prove to her mother—and more importantly, to herself?   

8. For a nonspeaking character, Pearl plays an essential role in this story. What did Pearl make you feel? What did she symbolize for you? What do Eve’s and Vera’s reactions to Pearl show us about their feelings toward their mother and their status in the family?

9. Storytelling is a theme that is threaded throughout the book: Eve and Vera play a game called “Fortunately/Unfortunately,” that keeps them connected in unfamiliar settings; Jane tells the girls much-loved tales about their father; Dago tells the story of the Ice Age. What do these different kinds of stories reveal about the characters who tell them? What do they reveal about the importance of storytelling in general?

10. Did The Last Animal make you think at all differently about the history or future of the planet?

One

In the Age of Extinction, two tagalong daughters traveled to the edge of the world with their mother to search the frozen earth for the bones of woolly mammoths.

Eve was fifteen, reshaping herself more each day; Vera, just shy of thirteen, was a stubborn straight line. Jane, their mother, was a graduate student in paleobiology. Their father had died one year before, plunged into a shock-green mountain in a tiny car on a tiny road in Italy where he was doing research for an article. Now they were three. Girls, sad and angry and growing and trying. Mom, sad and angry and trying. Hauling their bodies across the scoop of sky to get to a bare place, a lost place where ancient beasts had once roamed. Somehow, they hoped, this trip would be the beginning of a new road. Gentler, ascending.

* * *

Jane’s professor had grown a beard for the trip to Siberia, and Todd, a postdoc, wore all tan safari clothing. Everything had several pockets and zipped into different configurations. In New York, Vera watched Todd zip off the legs to his pants and jog laps around the terminal in shorts and hiking boots, his stained white athletic socks like burned-down candles. The professor plugged in a full power strip to charge his computer, tablet and two phones and then ate three kale salads out of plastic to-go containers. He said, “We’re unlikely to get fresh veggies. I want to vitamin-load.”

Vera wondered if the professor was someone’s father.

During their five-hour layover in Moscow Jane brought blini with caviar on a real plate to the seats where her daughters were draped, sleepy and prickling.

“Airport fish eggs, Mom, I don’t know,” Vera said. She wanted a burrito.

“You’re in junior high, what do you know? They’re actually so good,” Jane said, sour cream on her lips.

Eve said, “I’m in high school, but I still find this embarrassing.”

Todd, in the next row of chairs, again zipped his pant legs off and slung them over his carry-on, then jogged the halls. Eve made a hand flourish and said, “Exhibit A.” Vera watched the Russians watch Todd and it seemed possible that he alone might inspire a war between the two countries. Americans, if this was any indication, needed to be put out of their misery. It would have been a service.

As the sun was going down, they boarded a plane that would take them from Moscow to Yakutsk. The stewardesses in stilettos served chicken cutlet and sweet wine. The plane crossed six time zones and they had only traveled two thirds of the way across Russia.

Eve and Vera played a favorite game, Fortunately/Unfortunately, a game that had traveled with them on buses, planes, ships, trains all over the globe.

“Once there were two sisters who wanted to run away,” Eve started.

Vera said, “Fortunately, they had large bags full of precious gems.”

“Unfortunately,” Eve continued, “the gems were heavy and the girls couldn’t carry them.”

“Fortunately, they came upon a cave where they could hide the bags until they had a way to transport them.”

“Unfortunately, there was a wild and ferocious bear living in the cave.”

Vera smiled at her older sister. “You always put a ferocious bear.”

“It’s a classic.”

The story was, by design, endless. Meant to carry the girls across land and sea, every piece of bad news immediately followed by the upswing of salvation.

It was morning again when they landed, dawn a fine pink stripe on the horizon. Vera felt broken by tiredness. She was not a person anymore but a hunger for sleep. The tarmac smelled like fire and melt.

This was the coldest city on earth in winter and all the photos in the hotel lobby were of people with iced eyelashes, men in fur suits with fur hoods selling fish in the outside market and everything shimmered with frost and the fish were frozen but not because they had been in a freezer. It was summer now but Vera could sense the threat of cold.

While the travelers checked in, the professor and Todd had a loud conversation about three-pointers in relationship to wingspan in the NBA. The professor said, “Who wants a drink?” Jane said, “It’s morning and I have children.”

“Go, go,” Vera said. “We will sleep.”

“If you sleep now you’ll never get onto the right time. You’ll ruin the entire trip.”

The desk clerk handed Jane her key. It was old-fashioned and had a giant wooden block for a key chain. These were the moments when careers took shape. Trust was earned over jet-lag vodka.

Jane said, “Go walk, girls,” and motioned her sleepy daughters outside.

“Alone? In a foreign land?” Eve said.

“It’s good for you.”

Outside, Eve told Vera, “I’ve never hated anyone so much in my life.” The day cracked at them with its light.

“Dudes, ugh,” Vera said, shaking her head.

“Mom abandoned us just now. Don’t blame men when it was clearly her choice to make.”

Vera said, “She had to. The patriarchy, and stuff?” She looked at her watch as if it could set her right, as if knowing the time would clarify the moment. The watch had belonged to her father, not fancy, a drugstore purchase, but precious because it had been on his wrist and had been a tool for mapping his life. Vera could not get the numbers to make sense.

Everyone on the street was dressed well, especially the women, all looking as if they were about to be photographed. The backdrop was bloc and bland, buildings as storage for lives.

“Americans are such slobs,” Vera said. “I am basically wearing jammies and I felt proud that I brushed my teeth and hair sometime yesterday. What are we doing here again?”

Eve said, “That’s easy. Mom is pretending to be a necessary part of an important project and not a token woman with both literal and emotional baggage. I can see the headline, Woman, Supposed to Be Invisible, Brings Obnoxious Children on Science Trip, Ruins Everything. Couldn’t she have sent us to sleepaway camp? I’d have been a counselor and made out with boys behind the mess hall and gotten in big trouble and learned to paddle a canoe. Instead, this.”

Vera said, “We won’t ruin anything. Look at us being invisible and out of the way so that the adults can drink vodka in preparation to look for ancient mammoth bits to better understand the genetic code and use that information to edit Asian elephant cells until they act like woolly cells. Plus, tour the future home for de-extincted woolly mammoths. That’s a summer well spent.”

“Listen to you, little lady. You sound better than Mom.”

“I have heard her say that ten thousand times. It’s embedded in my brain, like a phone number.”

“To making a mammoth,” Eve said, holding an invisible glass aloft, toward streetlights strung up on a wire.

They cheered with their fists. “Except I think we’re supposed to say ‘cold-adapted elephant.'”

Eve said, “How completely lame.”

“They don’t want to be criticized for playing God.”

“You know the professor dreams of snuggling up to a woolly of his own making.”

Couples sat on benches and the girls walked across a bridge over a wide, shallow river. The bridge was covered in padlocks. Names were written on the locks. Hearts and arrows and the word “Love” in English.

At the other end of the bridge a worker in a green zip-up jumpsuit cut locks, one by one. He knelt, brought the bolt cutter into place and squeezed. The locks that did not fall into the river were kicked in by the worker, each one sounding a different note as it fell into the water.

Love and declarations of love lasted however long, and then they sank.

“Do you think the grown-ups are drunk yet?” Vera asked. “Drunk enough that we can sneak past the bar and go to sleep?” She looked to her big sister for permission.

Eve said, “All I care about is a bed. I am willing to risk my life for it.”

Vera did not know what she was willing to risk her life for. Science, progress, comfort, love, sleep.

The next morning the expeditioners repacked and took their things back to the airport for the last Siberian flight.

The plane had had most of its seats removed to carry cargo. Vera noted cases of rice, beets, a green vegetable she did not recognize. The professor sat atop coolers with pictures of fish on them and Todd perched on a wheel of dark orange cheese. Vera kept waiting for these necessities for survival to collapse under the weight of the American visitors. “Four short hours in blissful comfort,” Eve said in plastic-lady voice. “Where are you taking us?” But Jane was bright, visibly excited, and unbothered by her eldest’s skepticism.

The region below was more than a million square miles of tundra, permafrost, the earth without human intervention.

Every hour, Todd stood and did a series of stretches, hands raised to the ceiling, his shirt pulled up to reveal a thin strip of pale, furred belly. Eve mouthed, “Ew,” to Vera and Vera tried not to picture her hand on that stripe of skin. She did not want to want this crush, and yet . . .

The last airport of the journey was a dirt strip lined with abandoned Soviet propeller planes that looked like a pack of grazing animals.

Thick gray beard and fisherman’s hat, a man stood in the dirt beside a yellow car with no front bumper. “Dmitri,” he said, squeezing each hand hard. He introduced another man so obviously Dmitri’s son that he did not need to state it. “Aleksei,” the younger said. Dmitri and the professor hugged and smacked each other’s backs. Jane, Eve and Vera were greeted without eye contact. Aleksei took Eve’s and Vera’s roller bags by the handles and said, “We walk this way.”

Vera liked it more than she let on, this faraway feeling, this edge-of-it-all place.

The professor and Dmitri walked together, with Todd and Aleksei behind. Eve and Vera were paired and Jane walked at the back, alone. She looked like the odd kid on a field trip, buddyless. If the girls’ father had been alive he would have held Jane’s hand as she walked into this mission. Or, if their father had been alive he would have stayed home with the children and Jane would have gone on her own. Either version prickled Vera. This level of parental humanity caused a very specific stomachache. She tried to catch her mother’s eye but Jane’s attention was toward the horizon.

Vera smelled the river before she saw it. Mud and silt and willows. To reach Dmitri’s land on the northern coast of this northern land they would travel the rest of the way on water, a twenty-hour barge ride to the East Siberian Sea. The group had already gone most of the way around the globe yet they had another night and another day before they stopped moving.

The river opened so wide the banks disappeared. It was its own small, moving sea. As they traveled farther, the mosquitoes rose off the water like a living fog and found all the warm skin, this floating feast. The Americans put their jackets on even though it wasn’t cold and they wore two pairs of socks and wrapped blankets around their legs and heads, leaving spaces to breathe. Todd zipped the legs to his pants back on and hopped to confuse the insects. The professor wrapped himself tightly in blankets and lay down on the deck like a mummy. If he had died like that no one would have been able to tell the difference. Vera felt like a cocooned creature preparing to be born as a new species. Even outfitted this way, they were bitten. Vera inhaled a mosquito that had found her small air hole. She felt its soft body in her mouth but instead of risking a naked hand to fish it out, she swallowed.

Even Vera, who wanted to be up for the task at hand, now wondered if this had been too much to ask. “I’m sorry,” Jane said. She could have come alone. She could have risked missing them. Could have risked them missing her.

There were enough insects that they had weight. If Vera went uncovered she would be bloodless in moments, a sheet of skin.

Dmitri swatted and he said, “You should have seen it a few weeks ago. May is worst. Lucky for you to be here in June.”

There was a long sunset in the middle of the night and everything else was noon, and their bodies were so upside-downed that they rested like dogs-someone was always asleep, briefly, then hungry and disoriented. In the dawn or dusk of a day that never ended or began they pulled to a spot on the side of the river where there were two huge posts, and finally, finally tied off.

There was a small wooden dock onto which Aleksei tied the boat. He stood with arms out to help the passengers down. Vera looked out at grass and brush, at the dark wet earth. She could see some small cabins down a path of mud and in the distance were pine trees. It looked like the African savanna crossed with a high meadow. She could hear the river water against the bank and from somewhere, wind or ocean—she was not sure which. Watching the people disembark was a herd of something very big, great hairy bodies and horns. The animals were chewing grass. Todd said, “Compatriots,” and saluted. When Vera stepped out, the ground was spongy and dark. There was a gassy smell, the long-ago seeping out of the earth. Eve and Vera took their own bags this time because Dmitri and Aleksei had boxes of food: coffee, powdered creamer, potatoes, onions, loaves of bread, a gallon of cooking oil, a cooler of moose and a single apple balanced on top.

At home in Berkeley everyone was gluten-free or vegan or lactose-intolerant or avoided nightshades. Even the teenagers ordered cold-pressed green juice instead of coffee (or they ordered coffee but it was single-origin and fair-trade and the cup arrived with a perfect leaf in the organic, grass-fed foam). Dmitri did not ask if there were food sensitivities in the group. These were the available foods and the human bodies required their sustenance.

The large hairy creatures stared at the bald humans. Dmitri said, “Within the park where we have animals grazing the ground is flatter but you should still follow paths. Outside the park you will sink into mud immediately and get stuck. That way is the sea, everywhere else is more and more of Siberia. The size of this land is incomprehensible which is why we need all the animals to help take care of it. You have met musk oxen, we have also bison and wild horses. Grazers to save the world.” One animal hoofed at the ground, eyes on Vera, who reached a hand toward her big sister. The thing was ancient and matted and seemed made-up, like a great blanket with legs. Creatures belonged to this place; humans were the obvious intruders.

 “Fortunately,” Eve said to Vera, “the beasts were vegetarians.”

Vera knotted Eve’s fingers in her own. “Unfortunately, they used their massive horns to defend themselves.”

Eve said, “I’ve always suspected that our parents accepted the probability that we would die in the field. Fortunately, you won’t be the victim of a mall shooting, but unfortunately, your mother’s work has now taken you to the land of the angry yak.”

Jane appeared out of nowhere and said, “That’s not a yak, it’s a muskox. You’ll be fine.”

“Dad always told us a nervous vegetarian is more deadly than a hungry carnivore.”

Vera was quiet but a blue pool sat at the bottom of her belly. Her father battered at her. This life of movement and travel and research had been his idea first and he had given it to Jane like a virus and Eve and Vera were born infected. They had grown up on the road, on the move, in countries all over the world. They had been brave, or else they had had no choice. Both felt true, in alternating moments. The summer Vera was nine and Eve eleven their family had been evacuated from Somalia when a civil war had broken out. It was four years ago but Vera remembered perfectly being driven in a bulletproof car through the deserted streets to a grass runway where a small propeller plane waited. It was only them and another white family. Their dad had said, “Life is not easy. You don’t get great art without war. You don’t get progress without cost. You don’t get beauty without suffering.” Only, the person who died wasn’t the one who suffered, Vera now thought. He had been driving too fast on an Italian road but she was the one who had to live with the crash for the rest of her life. A crash that felt like it was always happening somewhere in her own mind. Vera had always wanted to be a good helper and now she bent toward tasks as a matter of survival. Heartbreak paved over with a list of to-dos.

Eve surveyed the high tundra and said, “Dear Diary, I am having the best summer ever! I have made so many fun friends at my life-guarding job and I’m getting a great tan. I think I have a crush on my boss.”

At least there was Eve. At least Eve knew how to be angry out loud. As the firstborn, it was her job to be the icebreaker ship, plowing through her mother’s good intentions. Fifteen was old enough to brew stronger, higher-value anger. Vera’s version, at thirteen, was only a mixer.

“I do not love you,” Eve said to their mother.

“You do love me and I know it. This is exactly, exactly, what love feels like.”US

Additional information

Dimensions	1.0000 × 6.2000 × 9.3000 in
Imprint	Riverhead Books
ISBN-13	09780593420522
ISBN-10	0593420527
Author	Ramona Ausubel
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC019000, FIC043000
Subjects	family saga, mother daughter relationships, women's fiction, gifts for women, mothers day gifts, literary fiction, books for women, womens fiction, book club recommendations, animal book, FIC043000, books fiction, mom books, mom gifts, two sisters, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, novels about science, no one is here except all of us, awayland, families, science, family, mothers, mom, love, motherhood, Animals, grief, Literature, coming of age, FIC019000, book club books, animal books, gifts for mom, mothers day, climate change, books for mom