I don’t read too much middle-grade fiction, but I do occasionally dip my toe, and The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera has been recommended by enough friends that it was high on my list to try. And with Middle Grade on this year’s Bingo board, there was no better time than the present.
The Last Cuentista takes place mostly on a generation ship that had fled Earth in the midst of political strife and environmental upheaval. The lead, a girl who dreams of becoming a storyteller like her grandmother, joins her parents and younger brother in cryogenic sleep. But a shipboard revolution sees her wake to a society nothing like the one she’d been promised. Memories of Earth have been nearly eradicated in service of wiping away differences and building a world that eliminates war and strife through strict conformity. But the lead’s memories have come through intact, leaving her struggling to hide her differences while also weaving stories that may free the minds and bodies of her compatriots.
It’s always a little bit tricky to review middle grade fiction as an adult reader who doesn’t specialize in fiction for that audience. There tends not to be much subtlety, and the leads can often effect change much more quickly and reliably than feels realistic. Those aren’t flaws so much as just what you get when reading works for younger audiences. So I try to give a pinch more suspension of disbelief, for all that I remain an adult who sees the story through grown eyes.
While the villains may be a bit over-the-top in their evil, they also do provide at least a surface-level justification for their actions, which helps with that suspension of disbelief. It also helps in maintaining the tension throughout the narrative. At first, the reader worries that the lead’s genetic eye disease will exclude her from the competition to win a place on the ship and escape the horrors of a dying Earth. Then, there’s the risk of discovery in a society that will not hesitate to eliminate nonconformists. And finally, the way so many others are treated as disposable spurs the lead not just to protect herself but to save all those vulnerable people in the path of the collective. All together, it makes for a story that’s compelling from the start and never needs any artificial drama to supplement the main thrust of the narrative.
Fiction about the power of storytelling isn’t exactly unusual, and while that element doesn’t tread new ground, it’s refreshing in the way it ties in unfamiliar tales—at least to me, coming from a different cultural background than the author or lead—as well as for the way it requires the lead to develop new stories for new situations. Similarly, novels railing against forced assimilation are quite familiar, and the villains here are so thoroughly horrible that The Last Cuentista doesn’t make a case for diversity so much as one against a particularly extreme form of assimilation. But much more emotionally urgent is the treatment of people who have ceased to become useful—it’s this that truly spurs the lead to shift her priorities, and it makes for a powerful case against a purely instrumental view of human value, one that’s much more concrete and immediate than the surface-level diversity theme.
The conclusion doesn’t give quite as much closure as I had hoped for, but there’s still enough to give the lead a complete arc and not leave the reader too in the dark about the progression of events just after the finish. Like much of the book before it, it’s well-written and emotionally satisfying, even if it won’t come as a big surprise for those who are more familiar with genre tropes.
On the whole, The Last Cuentista isn’t a book that breaks the mold and demands attention from those outside its target audience, but neither is it a book that’s uninteresting for older readers. Instead, it’s a strong middle-grade novel that’s surely best for younger readers but can still be a quality read for adults.
Recommended if you like: middle-grade fiction, dystopias, stories about stories.
Can I use it for Bingo? Middle Grade is the obvious one, but there are also some Politics, and probably an Author of Color (at least by common US parlance).
Overall rating: 16 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.