The Last Cuentista
by Donna Barba Higuera
Summary
In the year 2061, twelve year old Petra Peña boards a colony ship bound for a distant planet called Sagan as a comet closes in on Earth, carrying with her the cuentos, the folk stories, her grandmother taught her back home. A malfunction in Petra's stasis pod implant leaves her semiconscious through the centuries long voyage while everyone else sleeps soundly, and when she finally wakes on arrival she finds that a totalitarian faction calling itself the Collective has taken control of the ship, erasing the memories and personal histories of nearly every other passenger in the name of a supposedly perfect new society. Petra is nearly alone in still remembering Earth, her family, and the stories she carried with her, and she uses those same cuentos to reach the other young colonists, rebuilding pieces of a shared human history the Collective tried to erase. Her younger brother Javier survives too, though reprogrammed into a loyal Collective scientist, and when Petra discovers that the Collective has turned a deadly native plant into an airborne toxin meant to wipe out the colonists from an earlier ship, Javier turns against his handlers, launches her and a group of children toward the surface in a shuttle, and stays behind to blow up the dock. The book ends with the group approaching that earlier settlement as drones from the ship spray the toxin overhead, and Petra, close to despair, hearing guitars and fiddles in the distance, a sign that someone there has survived and that her fight against the Collective's erasure of memory and story has not been for nothing.
Higuera blends science fiction with Mexican folklore throughout, weaving actual cuentos into the narrative as both comfort and resistance, and the book moves with real tension once Petra wakes on the ship, closer to a dystopian thriller than a quiet coming of age story. It suits readers who like science fiction with real emotional stakes, and its central idea, that a society built on erasing memory and story is a kind of violence in itself, gives the book a political edge under its adventure plot.
Historical Context & Significance
Levine Querido published The Last Cuentista on October 12, 2021, and it won both the 2022 Newbery Medal and the 2022 Pura Belpré Award for Author, a rare double for a single book. That year's four Newbery Honor books were Rajani LaRocca's Red, White, and Whole, Darcie Little Badger's A Snake Falls to Earth, Kyle Lukoff's Too Bright to See, and Andrea Wang's Watercress, illustrated by Jason Chin.
Kirkus Reviews called it an exquisite gift to storytellers of any age, and School Library Journal's Mara Alpert described it as compulsively readable science fiction that still offers real intellectual weight. The book was published in Britain as The Last Storyteller in 2022, and it was named among the year's best books by outlets including Time, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal.