From a taxonomic point of view, The Last Animal is a sweet, poignant descendant of Jurassic Park ... Such a strange literary creation sounds unlikely to survive in the wild, but in Ausubel’s laboratory, it springs alive to explore questions that stump scientists and families, problems of the head and of the heart ... The quirky comedy of this novel constantly pushes back against the story’s abiding gloom. The whole book is glazed with a thin layer of absurdity ... The animal is a painful reminder of the loved one they can’t bring back. 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.
Love it I did. Devour it I did. Recommend it to everyone, I do ... 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 ... The Last Animal is many things. A mother-daughter love story. A global-warming warning. A fabulist fantasy. A sci-fi eco-scheme. A coming-of-age duet. A feminist critique of workplace misogyny. A study of grief. Even if none of these genres are your jam, I suggest you do what I do when approaching a work of Ausubel’s. Forget everything you think you know about your reading tastes, sink into her weird world and prepare to fall in love with a 4,000-year-old baby mammoth.
The Last Animal, the latest novel by Ramona Ausubel, soars where so many other books about family dynamics simply coast ... Rather than wallowing in interiorized melodrama, though, The Last Animal instantly injects Ausubel's telltale zing — in the form of an ice-bound baby mammoth and Jane's decision to go rogue on a kind of madcap ethical bender. But even more refreshing is the utter rejection of miserableness on the part of the grieving family ... The book also tackles sexism, both personal and institutional, and it does so with wryness rather than clickbait cliches ... A bright-eyed meditation on what animates us, biologically as well as emotionally — but most of all, familially.
Sustained sorrow...underpins Ramona Ausubel’s new novel ... Ironically, the book also manages to be a mirthful romp of chicanery and derring-do ... Ausubel grips her reader’s hand firmly, constantly dropping blunt reminders of her tale’s ideas and stripping them of nuance. While the family’s revelations are deeply felt, and the book’s concerns authentic, misty-eyed pronouncements run riot.
The idea that a graduate student with no clout would be allowed to bring kids along 'to the edge of the world' strains credulity, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of this novel’s outlandish albeit endearing improbabilities. Ausubel has concocted a wild and woolly global escapade about unbounded scientific experimentation ... The two smart, competent sisters are a tight duo, wonderfully delineated ... The Last Animal is a hairy but cuddly beast of a novel that sheds life lessons, some heartwarming, many sticky with sentiment.
Climate anxiety—or perhaps, more specifically, ecological grief—looms large over the family at the center of the narrative ... Ausubel has long been brilliant at conveying the strange and improbable alongside the beautiful specifics of the mundane. The Last Animal feels haunted by exhaustion both literal and existential and the dreamlike quality that accompanies such fatigue ... 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.
There’s a directness to Vera’s speech that can make this novel feel like children’s literature at times, spelling out what the reader has already intuited ... The Last Animal is Ausubel’s most conventional book, lacking the fantastic or grotesque little jolts that characterize her short stories and her two earlier novels ... Only once in this novel does she deploy her stunning gift for the narrative swerve ... Ausubel’s elegant prose is skillfully stripped back in this book, the better to suit her headlong plot and do justice to the ethical issues thrumming behind the action.
Transfixing ... 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.
Wondrous and tender ... 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 ... 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.
Sparkling ... Whizzes around the planet—from the steppes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to a remote alpine village—with a dizzying, almost madcap speed, but at the novel’s heart are the deep ties between mother and daughters, sister and sister, human and animal. Though Jane, Eve and Vera are grieving, they never lose their sense of adventure and love of scientific discovery. Ausubel crafts this moving story with wit and depth, allowing readers to witness a family drawn together by both loss and a sense of wonder at an ever-changing planet.
[A] gem ... 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.
