THE LAST ANIMAL

After the death of their father, two teens accompany their scientist mom on a globe-trotting quest to save the planet.

“It's like they always say, you look down for one week to breed a woolly mammoth and when you look up again your little girls have turned into women.” Deadpan gems like this sparkle in just about every scene of Ausubel’s fourth volume of highly original fabulist fiction, which marries an extraordinary and slightly bananas scientific adventure with a deeply felt portrait of a mother and daughters healing from terrible loss. Jane married the professor of her ancient humanoids course; their daughters, Vera and Eve, were 11 and 14 when their father plunged to his death in the Italian Alps while driving a cooler full of Neanderthal tissue samples from one lab to another. As the novel opens, a year later, their mom has dragged them to Siberia, where scientists are searching for woolly mammoth bones in service of a theory that bringing back certain extinct species could help reverse climate change. (It makes sense but, unsurprisingly, cannot be summarized in this space.) Bored and fed up, the girls go off for a wander and come back with the frozen, perfectly preserved body of a baby woolly mammoth. Immediately the men on the expedition name it Aleksei and move to claim credit. Back home in Berkeley, their mom meets an eccentric millionaire named Helen who owns a castle and a wild animal preserve on Lake Como in Italy, and the two hatch a plan to take back the wheel on woolly mammoth resurrection. The unfolding story hops to Iceland and then to Lake Como, settings that Ausubel makes magical and fully capable of containing the ever kookier plot. "I am working toward my PhD in weird shit," says Eve, though both girls yearn continually for the ordinary life they lost when their father died.

An amazing amount of humor, pizazz, wisdom, and wonder packed into a story that is essentially about processing grief.