The Last Cuentista (Levine Quierdo)
Written by Donna Barba Higuera
For ages: 9-14
Halley’s Comet has become a threat to humanity, barreling towards Earth. Scientists have determined it will impact and destroy the planet. So adolescent Petra Peña’s family was chosen to join one of three space arks leaving to restart human civilization on the distant unpopulated world humans have named Sagan. During this journey, all the scientists and their families will be put into stasis, frozen as they are, and given vast quantities of knowledge over the centuries it will take to reach Sagan. Another group of people have been chosen to maintain the stasis pods and will teach this to their children and on and on until the grand day arrives. While it is heartbreaking to leave Earth behind, everyone has hopes for this new chance.
However, problems arise from the start. The pre-selected academic courses loaded into Petra’s pod aren’t right. It’s missing the mythology and folklore extracurricular she was looking forward to. Petra had an extremely close relationship with her grandmother, who taught the young girl to have a deep appreciation of the power of storytelling in Mexican culture. Through these larger-than-life characters, Petra discovered the means to keep going despite hardship. Petra wakes up thinking it’s time to begin populating Sagan but discovers something terrible has happened during her sleep. A cultish group known as The Collective has infiltrated the ship’s crew. It has erased the memories & identities of so many. Petra finds herself renamed Zeta-1 and has to hide her memories of the old world as she tries to figure out if she can reverse this horrible development.
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