Three children’s books evoke Colorado state of mind
A bedtime story, a geology primer and the untold tale of a dinosaur bone hunter
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A bedtime story, a geology primer and the untold tale of a dinosaur bone hunter
Expert guide breaks down soil, climate and the urgent need to plant natives
A review of The Afterlife of Mal Caldera
Debut novel inhabits Alaskan wilderness with two souls, lost and searching
A remembrance and a close look at Fountain Creek, the West’s “most human dominated water system”
Anyone But Her draws on traditional psychological suspense elements, adds unique complications
Hybrid memoir/investigation creates a collage of a complex life and death
Debut novel shines a light on small town poverty and human resilience
Fort Collins-based author-wizard Ramona Ausubel’s most recent novel, The Last Animal, released in 2023 and out now in paperback, makes leaps of imagination across continents and millennia seem perfectly plausible. The story involves single mother Jane, a frustrated grad student in paleobiology, recently widowed; and her two teenage daughters, Eve and Vera, The Last Animal opens with this codependent family unit on a scientific expedition to Siberia where the girls, on a typically boredom-filled afternoon, stumble upon the bones of a 4,000-year old woolly mammoth. That’s just the beginning. Mother and daughters, through a series of subterfuge-fueled moves, end up at an exotic animal farm in Italy where the DNA of their fossil is implanted into an elephant with the goal of resurrecting an extinct species. What happens beyond that is a series of tender, hilarious, heart-rending and suspenseful moments that testify to the unbreakable ties of family, for better or worse, alongside the loneliness and impossibility of thriving without connection. Smart, beguiling, touching and entertaining, The Last Animal peers into our shared animal souls, at once raising pertinent questions about the limits of bioengineering and taking the reader on a helluva good ride. — Kathryn Eastburn