Title: The Last Cuentista Author: Donna Barba Higuera
Published: October 12, 2021
Genre(s): Science Fiction
Page Count: 320
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:There lived a girl named Petra Peña, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita.
But Petra's world is ending. Earth has been destroyed by a comet, and only a few hundred scientists and their children – among them Petra and her family – have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race.
Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet – and the discovery that she is the only person who remembers Earth. A sinister Collective has taken over the ship during its journey, bent on erasing the sins of humanity's past. They have systematically purged the memories of all aboard – or purged them altogether.
Petra alone now carries the stories of our past, and with them, any hope for our future. Can she make them live again?
What is it that makes us human? It’s a somewhat tired question, one that has many trite and/or obvious answers. On two ends of the spectrum, some may say that what separates humans from other animals is either (a) our ability to invent new and creative forms of cruelty upon request; or, conversely, it is (b) our tendency toward selflessness and compassion even when there is no benefit to ourselves. Ask 10 people no the street to define humanity, and you’ll probably get just as many answers. In The Last Cuentista, Donna Barba Higuera proposes an answer of her own.
On the outside, this book appears as if it will read like a straightforward climate crisis apocalypse science fiction book, following familiar genre traditions and tropes—albeit modified slightly for a very young audience. For me, what was most interesting was the way Higuera adapted a familiar premise for a late elementary / early middle school audience. The Last Cuentista is absolutely a science fiction novel, but all of the elements of the genre are muted just a bit, so that the central focus is on the characters and their inner journey. Sure, there are space ships and futuristic tech and alien lifeforms, but they feel almost like a backdrop, rather than integral pieces of the story.
Which is not to say that this is a bad approach, nor is it to say that I didn’t like it. But in the same way that the novel poses an answer to a universal, a large-scale question, the storytelling seems to make attempts at being universally accessible, regardless of any child’s individual genre preferences.
With less focus on “pew! pew! pew! spaceships!,” it is then easy for Higuera to tell a highly internalized story about Petra. Petra is trapped on a ship run by a hivemind conglomerate out to create a dystopia, but that story seems secondary. The author’s focus is largely on Petra’s memories, the stories her abuelita told her, and the stories Petra tells the other children on the ship. The tone of the story is introspective, and even when exciting things are happening, there’s not a huge sense of urgency to the text.
Sure, absolutely, there are some life-or-death situations, and there has to be a reckoning with respect to the dystopian overlords. But there’s no big shootout battle. Petra doesn’t make an impressive speech that rouses her companions to unplug themselves from the metaphorical Matrix. The Last Cuentista isn’t this kind of book—and I’m not sure that kind of book would translate well for a 10-year-old prospective audience, either.
The Last Cuentista is a contemplative novel about humanity and the power of stories to inspire, to teach, and to unite. I think the awards and praise are well-deserved, and the story is overall successful. Any complaints I may have are almost certainly related to the fact that I’m an adult and I wanted “adult explanations” for certain things. But overall? A very good book.
