The Last Animal

Description

A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

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 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 Teeth
Ramona 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?

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