The Last Cuentista, by Donna Barba Higuera

The Last Cuentista, by Donna Barba Higuera (October 12th 2021 by Levine Querido), is mind-blowing middle grade science fiction.

Halley's comet has been knocked off course, and is about to smash into Earth. Petra Peña is one of the lucky ones who gets a chance to flee across space to a new home, and though her heart breaks to leave her grandmother, she's determined to take with her all her grandmother's stories, and as many other stories from Earth  that she can cram into her head. But instead of waking up from stasis a few hundred years later at the planet that will be her new home, with her parents and brother next to her, she wakes up to a dystopian nightmare.

The ship has been overtaken by zealots of the Collective (who believe the group is all that is important, and that conformity and unthinking cooperation are the path toward peace, because when everyone is the same there is no reason for war). All the sleeping colonists have been brainwashed as they travelled through space, and have been awakened in bits and dribbles during the journey, to serve the cause of the Collective. They remember nothing of their former lives on Earth.

Petra is one of the last to be woken, and the brainwashing did not work on her. She remembers everything...all the stories her abuelita told her, all the books she read, all her love for her family, are still there. And so she sets out to thwart the Collective by making the planet they've finally reached into a home for herself and a handful of other children, a place where she can tell her stories, and new stories can be made.

It is not a comfortable read. It is a powerful, wrenching, disturbing one. I couldn't read it all in one sitting even though the writing was great, Petra was a great heroine, and the story was tremendously compelling. Perhaps the target audience (who I'd put at 10-13 years old) won't find it as emotionally difficult; young readers are better, I think, at taking fictional darkness in their stride...

Happily it ends (after an extra sharp bit of heart-ache) at a happy and hopeful point. I wish I could relax and assume that now everything will be fine....but there is lots of room for a sequel that would be another emotional wringer....

Middle grade science fiction is fairly thin on the ground compared to fantasy, and there are very few books about kids travelling through space and exploring exo-planets (the Zero series, by Dan Wells, and Sovereign, by Jeff Hirsch, are the only ones that come to mind). I very much enjoyed the parts of The Last Cuentista that involved Petra's work as a biologist (the role the Collective determined for her) on the planet. But though this was something of respite from the tension of the Collective controlled space ship, it was overhung by the wrongness that what should have been a magical experience shared with her family was instead part of a desperate child's struggle to find a way to be free to remember and to dream.

It's a powerful, memorable, compelling, terrifying story. I have one reservation regarding disability rep. though--Petra has retina pigmentosa, and right at the beginning it's made clear that this is already having a negative impact on her vision. But once she wakes up from stasis, it becomes back-burnered, and we don't hear about it even when she's on the surface of the planet, with strange vistas all around her, or sneaking around the space ship in dim lighting....there are maybe two more mentions of it, with no substance. I felt a little cheated by this, but not enough to substantively dim my admiration for the book as a whole.

disclaimer: review copy received for Cybils Award consideration.