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. The story is told from the first-person perspective of 12-year-old Petra Peña. Because she is in stasis during the voyage from Earth to Sagan, she is only 13 by the time the novel ends. In terms of her own temporal perspective, less than a year of her life has passed despite the monumental changes that have taken place around her while she slept.

When the novel opens, the Earth is about to be struck by Halley’s Comet, and a small, select band of scientists and their families have been chosen to board three spaceships to carry them to a new planet with an atmosphere that supports life. Their journey will take 380 years to complete. While the survivors sleep, generations of caretakers known as Monitors will look after them physically. Meanwhile, a faction on Earth known as the Collective is intent on eradicating all differences among people, thereby eliminating war and hunger.

By the time Petra awakens, the Monitors have been replaced by the Collective, and the rest of her family has been purged. All attempts to brainwash Petra have failed, in part because a kindly Monitor downloaded literature and legend files into her memory so she can carry forward humanity’s creative legacy. She sets out to rescue the remaining Earthlings on the ship by taking them to safety on Sagan. They hope to find a group of First Arrivers who established a human colony centuries before. As the story follows Petra’s trials and eventual victory in the face of Collective’s pressure to conform, the novel examines the themes of Individual Versus Group Consciousness, Past Versus Future, and The Heart’s Memories.

Plot Summary

Twelve-year-old Petra Peña lives happily with her parents and seven-year-old brother, Javier, in the futuristic American Southwest in the year 2061. She loves to spend time with her grandmother, Lita, who is a cuentista or storyteller. Petra wants to be a storyteller when she grows up, and Lita encourages her not only to learn the myths and legends of her people but to embellish and change them to fit her own circumstances.

Petra’s happy existence is shattered when she learns that Halley’s Comet is expected to collide with the Earth that summer. Because her mother is a botanist and her father is a geologist, they are chosen to join a band of survivors bound for a distant, inhabitable planet called Sagan. Petra’s family enters the spacecraft and is placed in a sleep state called stasis. While she is asleep, Petra’s mind is meant to receive downloaded programs called En Cognito, or Cogs, that will make her an expert in botany and geology when she awakens. She has also requested an elective download of the world’s mythology and literature, which a Monitor, or caretaker, named Ben promises to give her.

As Petra goes into stasis something malfunctions, and she returns to wakefulness at various stages of the journey. She becomes aware that a faction among the Monitors has taken over the ship. This group is called the Collective, and they wish to eradicate humanity’s past and make everyone the same. They believe that selfish individuals have created war and poverty, so individuality must be abolished. Everyone should serve the group needs of the Collective, and there is no place in this new world order for creativity, imagination, or individuality. Over the past few centuries, the population of the ship has shifted from natural reproduction to genetic engineering, with subsequent generations of the Collective being produced in a lab on board the ship.

By the time Petra awakens, she is given the named of Zeta-1 and has been programmed to serve the Collective as a botanist and geologist. However, the same programming glitch that allowed her to periodically return to consciousness also allows her to retain memories of her past and of all the stories, or cuentos, that she learned from Lita. Petra is determined to find her family and escape the oppressive Collective but learns that her parents have been purged and her brother’s body is missing.

When she goes on an exploratory mission to Sagan’s surface, Petra makes plans to escape with the rest of the Zeta team and find the First Arrivers. Unbeknownst to her, the head of the Collective, Chancellor Nyla, wants to use a toxic plant to exterminate all human life on the planet. The rays from Sagan’s two suns are too intense for the members of the collective—their fragile skin blisters when exposed to it—so they must stay on the mothership while the human Zetas continue to explore. When a Collective member who joined this expedition develops severe blisters and dies, it becomes clear that Sagan will not be habitable for the crew, and they’ll have to search for another planet.

As Petra searches for a way to escape, she realizes that the cuentos she has been recounting to her shipmates are helping them remember who they once were. She also finds a surprising ally in a young Collective member named Voxy, who professes a desire to live in a world that has stories in it. Petra also finds her younger brother Javier onboard. He is now an elderly man who has served the Collective for his entire life, but Petra helps him tap into the memories contained in his heart and remember his real identity.

At one point, it seems that Javier betrays his sister by telling Nyla her plans, but this is part of his larger scheme to save Petra and the rest of the humans. He thwarts Nyla’s plans to spread a deadly toxin over the planet and sends the Zetas down to Sagan’s surface while he stays behind to prevent them from being followed. Petra and her team arrive safely, accompanied by Voxy, who would rather live among humans. The Collective ship departs, and Petra leads her band of rebels to the First Arrivers’ colony. She vows to recount all the cuentos she knows to the survivors and keep the legacy of humanity alive in this new world.