The Last Animal

After the death of their father, teenagers Vera and Eve are uprooted to Siberia by their mother, Jane. Jane is part of a team of scientists on the hunt for DNA to bring back the wooly mammoth in the hopes of helping the climate crisis. When Vera and Eve stumble upon a perfectly preserved four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth, they set off a chain of events that impacts their mother’s career and destabilizes their future. Ausubel (Awayland) creates a moving and complicated examination of grief and familial relations, combining relationship fiction and sci-fi. At its center, this story is about family and womanhood, with themes of coming-of-age, balancing motherhood and career, and the sexism women face in the workplace, particularly in science. Narrator Natasha Soudek gives distinct voices to the trio of women, placing listeners among the chaos and growing pains of the family. One might want to turn up the speed, as the narration is on the slower side.