The Last Cuentista

The Last Cuentista (October 2021) is a dystopian, middle-grade novel by author Donna Barba Higuera. Higuera made her debut in 2020 with Lupe Wong Won’t Dance, which won both a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association award and a Pura Belpré Award for children’s fiction. The following year, The Last Cuentista won a John Newbery Medal and a Pura Belpré Award. It also made multiple lists of Best Children’s Books of the Year.

Higuera grew up in the central California desert in a landscape similar to the setting she describes at the beginning of The Last Cuentista. Her feelings for this environment are lovingly rendered, emphasizing the stakes for the novel’s characters as Earth is on the cusp of destruction. The novel falls into the genres of children’s dystopian science fiction and children’s fantasy. It is intended for readers aged 10 and up. Some material may be intense for younger readers, though the overall tone of the book is hopeful, despite its dystopian classification. This study guide and all of its page citations are based on the Kindle edition of the novel.

The story begins on Earth in the summer of 2061 but concludes 380 years later, on a distant planet called Sagan.