'The Last Animal' is a bright-eyed meditation on what animates us
Ramona Ausubel's tale has a very recognizable family nucleus — a mother and her two teenage daughters, bound by blood yet fractured by tragedy. But it soars in its addition of an animal element.
What exactly is a family? Even more profoundly, why is a family?
Entire wings of the literary canon have confronted these questions, usually by framing them within the context of human families only. Which is why The Last Animal, the latest novel by Ramona Ausubel, soars where so many other books about family dynamics simply coast.
Granted, Ausubel's tale has a very recognizable family nucleus — breaks from the pack is the addition of an ostensibly wild-card element: the bioengineered resurrection of an extinct animal species. Namely, the woolly mammoth.
