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 9-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 9-12 Summary
Petra’s mind drifts back to the summer she turned 12. Her father took her to Rockhound State Park to look for some special rocks for his collection. He is a geologist, and Petra is aptly named because her name is the Greek word for “rock.” Her mother says rocks are strong and that Petra will be the foundation for something great someday. At the park, her father watches in disapproval as two other rock collectors use a drill to dig into the ground for turquoise and other valuable stones. He says, “You need to feel the dirt. Sense when it will give you a gift. And only take a few of what you need” (65). Petra remembers this as one of the best days of her life.
Back in the present, she reawakens in her pod when she realizes that someone is removing her. Petra notes that this person “barely looks human” (73), with blond hair, violet eyes, and translucent skin that shows the veins underneath. The woman is called the Chancellor and her male assistant, named Crick, looks exactly like her. Petra speculates that this frightening, new race of humans has erased all signs of difference among individuals. When they examine her, they notice her eye condition but consider the defect to be unimportant because they want the survivors for their brains.
While she was sleep, Petra was conditioned to say, “I am Zeta-1, Expert in botany and geology. I am here to serve the Collective” (70). However, unlike all the others, Petra retains some memory of her true identity. She says to herself, “My name is Petra Peña. We left Earth July 28, 2061. It’s now 2432, and we’ve arrived at Sagan. I’ll do whatever I have to do to find my family” (74). She observes as the other children in the pod room are revived and notices that her brother isn’t among them. When the attendants leave, she wanders down the hall in search of Javier but is found by Crick and returned to her chamber. He gives her a pill to relax her and get her to sleep. Petra doesn’t swallow it. To calm herself down, she thinks about her grandmother and pretends she is laying with her rather than in her cold, sterile pod.
Petra recalls a story that Lita told her about two star-crossed lovers in ancient Mexico, who were separated by warring tribes. They were transformed into mountains and are waiting for the strife of humanity to end. Petra thinks ruefully that thousands of years later, everybody is still out for themselves.
Chapters 13-16 Summary
The next morning, Petra tumbles out of bed late. Her two pod mates are already waiting for the arrival of the Chancellor. She has nicknamed one of them Rubio for his strawberry-blond hair, but his official name is Zeta-3. Zeta-4 is a little blond girl. Petra notices a tiny boy sneak up beside her. He is one of the Collective, and his name is Voxy. He is fascinated by Petra’s freckles because he’s never seen such features before. At that moment, Chancellor Nyla arrives to lead the three Zetas to the ship’s main dining room. Everyone that Petra sees looks exactly the same, with the same bone structure, veiny skin, and blond braids. She learns that they have all been biologically engineered and incubated in batches in a lab.
Petra is dismayed when she sees that the central room no longer contains items intended to mimic the Earth’s atmosphere with its plants, trees, and sunlit sky. Instead, everything is sterile, metallic, and cold. The Zetas are fed a brownish-green lump of food and drink a pale liquid. The food and drink expand in their stomachs like a full meal. Nyla announces to the Collective members in the room that the Zetas will be the first off the ship to collect water and plant samples on the new planet. There is some risk involved in this operation. A test subject from the Collective named Len is being sent with them.
Nyla tells everyone to enjoy a celebration that evening since they are nearing the end of their long journey. Music is piped in, and a holographic light show begins. People sip tonics of various colors that seem to put them in a euphoric mood. Petra overhears a conversation in which Nyla confides to Crick that the ship may have to travel for another 200 years if Sagan proves unable to sustain life.
The holographic show changes to display the destruction of the Earth by Halley’s Comet. Nyla asserts that Earth’s destruction was not a tragedy, but an opportunity: “Thanks to the Collective, not a single memory of a world filled with conflict, starvation, or war will find its way into our future” (110). Petra excuses herself from the party and is told to go back to her pod to rest. Instead, she wanders through the ship to the area where she knows her parents’ pods are located. To her horror, she finds their pods empty. The log states that both of her parents were “purged” after the Collective tried and failed to erase and reprogram their memories. She finds another pod with Javier’s name. It, too, is empty.
Petra returns to her own pod room, where Rubio and Zeta-4 are already asleep. She begins to cry as she reflects on her family and weights her options: “If I tell the Chancellor I remember everything, she’ll either purge me or try reprogramming me again. Either one is better than spending a life imagining what happened to Mom, Dad, and Javier” (119). Zeta-4 whimpers in her sleep, apparently having a dream about a childhood visit to the doctor. Petra knows the girl lost the actual memory of the event. She awakens Zeta-4 from her nightmare and to comfort her, she tells a story about an oppressive king and a resourceful princess who saves everyone. She also comes up with a nickname for the little blond girl: Feathers. Once the story is over, Feathers says she liked it very much and promises never to tell the Collective about Petra’s stories. Rubio was awake and overheard the story too. He also agrees to keep silent.
Chapters 9-16 Analysis
This set of chapters is principally concerned with Petra’s emergence from stasis. Since it has been almost four centuries since the survivors left Earth, an entirely new Collective culture has overtaken the ship. Because the first segment of the book carefully describes the comforting nature of Petra’s home on Earth, the new world of the Collective is all the more disturbing. Her physical descriptions of people and surroundings lean heavily on antiseptic smells and the alien appearance of the lab-engineered Collective personnel, all of whom look alike and are equally off-putting. Since Petra’s human shipmates have been successfully reprogrammed, she is the only person left alive who seems capable of thinking for herself. Her isolation as an individual is sharply contrasted with the passive behavior of the Collective group members.
This segment foregrounds the theme of Past Versus Future, as Petra experiences the reality of a new world devoid of history. The tactile experience of life on the ship has been altered since she arrived, as all the evidence of the plants and holographic Earth atmosphere has been removed. Food no longer tastes like food, and tonics are used as sedatives to keep everyone even-tempered. The physical environment feels like the inside of a test tube instead of a home. In divorcing this population entirely from Earth’s past, the Collective has lost the essence of being human, which is reflected in their physical, alien-like appearance. Translucent and veiny, they are beautiful but have lost the flush of life; they are purely functional beings.
When Petra goes in search of her family, she discovers that they have been purged. This leaves her with no physical connection to her biological family and no tactile connection to anything earthlike. To all appearances, it seems as if the Collective has succeeded in erasing human history. At this point in the story, Petra relies heavily on cuentos as a symbolic connection to her past. She imagines Lita is with her as well. Both strategies are attempts to imaginatively reconstruct aspects of the real world that are denied to her. In turning to cuentos for comfort, Petra also inadvertently begins to reawaken a spark in her remaining human companions. The stories tap into some deeper core identity among her brainwashed shipmates. The first glimmer of hope for reconstruction is demonstrated by their desire to hear more stories and conceal this activity from the Collective.
