66 pages • 2 hours read
Donna Barba HigueraThe Last Cuentista
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 1-4 Summary
Twelve-year-old Petra Peña lives on Earth in the year 2061. She is spending the evening with her grandmother, Lita, who is a traditional storyteller, or cuentista. She tells Petra the myth of Halley’s Comet and explains that it is really a blind fire snake in the sky trying to reunite with its mother, Earth. Unfortunately, the comet will strike the Earth on its next pass, so many people are being evacuated to colonize distant planets. Lita is staying behind, and Petra is heartbroken. Lita comforts her by telling her that she’ll always be with Petra in spirit, especially because Petra will tell the cuentos to new generations.
The next day, on the way to the ship’s launch site in Colorado, Petra is conflicted about the fact that her family will get to live while everyone else on Earth will die. She also recalls a television show her parents watched about a group of people known as the Collective that wants to erase all the differences in humanity to create permanent peace. Petra’s father is wary of the way the Collective intends to create harmony in the new world by eradicating diversity.
Petra’s mind returns to the present as the family approaches the launch site. It holds two waiting ships, and the trip is being kept secret from the general public. Conspiracy theorists are already trying to find the location to hijack the ships for themselves. The trip will take 380 years, but the travelers will be asleep throughout the journey. Petra will be traveling with her parents and her little brother, Javier, on a ship that looks like a giant praying mantis. The travelers on the ship will be attended to by Monitors, who will live and die on the ship, their descendants taking on these caretaking roles until the ship reaches its destination.
Petra is not alone in her misgivings about the plan. She thinks back to the night she overheard her parents talking about the journey. Her mother had the sobering realization that the number of Monitors was chosen for a specific reason: “One hundred and forty-six people, exactly the number of Monitors on each ship, is all it takes for humans to continue with enough genetic diversity in case the rest of us die” (16). Still, the plan is better than the alternative, and the family chose to take their opportunity to survive. Petra switches her attention to the En Cognito programs that will be implanted into her brain while she sleeps. Along with basic subjects, she has requested mythology as an elective and is excited about all of the stories she’ll know when she wakes up.
As the family boards the ship, Petra is nervous about her eye condition, retinitis pigmentosa. It limits her peripheral vision and will get worse with age. Anyone with a so-called “genetic flaw” like hers is barred from making the journey, but her parents keep her condition a secret and are allowed on board. The family is greeted by a sympathetic young Monitor named Ben. He leads them through the immense ship, which contains simulations to mimic the Earth’s atmosphere for the Monitors because they will spend the rest of their lives in this environment.
Chapters 5-8 Summary
Petra and Javier will be separated from their parents in a youth room, and Javier is frightened when he climbs into his sleep pod. When Petra tries to calm him down by telling him a story, she only makes his anxiety worse. Once he finally falls asleep, it’s Petra’s turn. She is looking forward to the science lessons that she will learn, and that she’ll wake up a scientist just like her parents. But she is mildly upset to learn that her elective course in mythology hasn’t been included in her En Cognito program. Ben promises to track it down while she is asleep.
Just before Petra says farewell to her parents, everyone notices a crowd trying to rush the spaceship. There is no time left, and the craft must take off immediately. Petra is hurriedly put to sleep amid this turmoil. But as the ship takes off, Petra realizes that she is still conscious. Something has malfunctioned. She tries to knock on the pod door to notify Ben, but she cannot move in her semi-stasis state. From outside her pod, Petra can hear conversations among the Monitors. A third ship that contained Ben’s brother has been overrun by rioters. Only two ships have been able to leave Earth’s atmosphere.
The Lead Monitor tries to console Ben by telling him that without politicians or government, this may be a chance for the survivors to start over and create a new history. Petra is unnerved at these words. She thinks back to the movement on Earth called the Collective that wanted to erase all human differences. She deduces that the Lead Monitor must be one of these people.
That night, Petra is still awake when Ben arrives to read some stories aloud to her since he couldn’t find her mythology program. He chooses the Epic of Gilgamesh. Petra is pleased and wonders why he’s reading aloud to her, since she supposedly can’t hear when in stasis. She concludes that “[m]aybe he needs to hear it as much as I did. Maybe he’s afraid and needs something to help him feel brave” (53).
Petra finally enters stasis for a while. She awakens on her 13th birthday to hear Ben saying he has a present for her. Even though he couldn’t get her curriculum approved by the Lead Monitor, he managed to put together a collection of mythology from around the world as well as the works of contemporary fantasy authors. Petra is delighted and feels herself drifting off to sleep again.
When she next awakens, Petra realizes that it is many years later and that Ben is now an old man. He has barricaded himself inside the pod room and is trying to download more files into Petra’s system. Ben is eventually overpowered by the Collective. They discover that Ben had been uploading the elective Cogs into her system, and Petra hears them say that Ben will have to be purged. She hears the people outside planning to delete all this information. They are intent on creating a new history for humankind.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
The book’s first segment introduces most of the major characters and establishes a baseline by describing normal activities on Earth among the members of a loving family. These descriptions stand in contrast to the atmosphere on the spacecraft, which could hardly be described as homey.
The nascent form of the organization that will later become the Collective is introduced briefly and foreshadows the much more radical turn the group takes later. In the face of an apocalyptic crisis, the Collective envisions a world free of hunger, war, and difference. Petra says this doesn’t sound so bad, but her father emphasizes that while these goals are noble, the Collective’s methods are frightening: eradicating all diversity isn’t a way to create world peace. The novel touches on the ways in which the dominant society is imperfect as well: The plan to save humanity involves selecting a small group of elite survivors while allowing everyone else on Earth to die, enlisting a servant class of Monitors to maintain the cryogenically-frozen travelers. While the goal of maintaining humanity and its history is important, the way it’s achieved here requires the sacrifice of many for the benefit of a very small group. By their standards, Petra shouldn’t have made the cut, as she has a “genetic defect” in her vision condition.
The ship’s Lead Monitor is a member of the fledgling Collective. While she isn’t as extreme as her future counterpart, Nyla, she attempts to prevent Petra from receiving elective Cog programs in mythology. An elective program is one that an individual chooses freely. Even in this small detail, the Collective wishes to suppress personal will.
In addition to the tension between Individual Versus Group Consciousness, these chapters also foreground the polarity of Past Versus Future. Petra overhears conversations outside her pod suggesting that the Collective aims to wipe away the past. The girl is a key player in this struggle because the mythology she has requested for download consists of stories from the past. While the Collective is intent on wiping away the past entirely, Petra is intent on preserving it. Her inability to enter stasis with the rest of her shipmates represents a subconscious desire to stand as guardian over the human history the Collective seeks to destroy.
The value of past knowledge is emphasized throughout the book through intertextuality, or referencing other texts to strengthen the book’s themes. In these early chapters, Higuera references both Aztec myths and the Epic of Gilgamesh, stories from ancient civilizations. These stories have stood the test of time—Gilgamesh is millennia old, the oldest piece of notable literature in the world—and their inclusion underlies the importance of Petra’s future role as Sagan’s cuentista.
