A World Without Story is Lost
Donna Barba Hilguera’s The Last Cuentista would be a standout book for middle-grade and secondary gifted readers in any year. The fact that it was the novel chosen to receive the Newbery Medal on the occasion of the American Library Association’s 100th Anniversary of the award, as well the 2022 Pura Belpre Award, add to its distinction.
The Newbery Medal Century
The American Library Association (ALA) has honored the century of the world’s first-ever children’s book award with a two-year celebration, 2021-2022. In 1921, Frederic Melcher, then editor of Publishers Weekly, proposed to the ALA that literature created for children should be honored just as adult poetry, fiction, drama annually received multiple awards. Melcher suggested that the award should be named in honor of eighteenth-century English bookseller, John Newbery. Melcher went so far as to commission artist Rene Paul Chambellan to create a bronze medal that would be presented to the author of “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” published in the previous year. In 1922, Hendrick Willem van Loon was awarded the very first Newbery Medal for his book, The Story of Mankind, published in 1921. Early on the importance of the Newbery Medal was noteworthy. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt attended the 1937 Newbery Banquet.
Melcher was also the guiding force in the establishment of the Caldecott Medal in 1937. The Caldecott Medal is presented to the artist who created the most distinguished picture book of the year.
For decades after the first Newbery and Caldecott Medals were established the winners were white authors and illustrators and the characters or subjects of the winning books were mostly white and middle class. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, minority authors and illustrators were singled out for medals. Also, librarians and publishers created awards to honor minority book creators. The most famous example of such diversity are the Coretta Scott King Awards for authors and illustrators first awarded in 1970. In 1996, the Pura Belpre Award was established to honor both the Latino/Latina authors and the illustrators of books that celebrate the Latino cultural experience. The award is named in honor of Pura Belpre, the first Latina librarian of the New York City Public Library. In 2022, Donna Barba Higuera received both the Newbery Medal and the Pura Belpre Award.
The Last Cuentista
The Last Cuentista is a rare middle-grade novel to win the Newbery Medal. Few works of science fiction literature have won the award. Even fewer dystopian novels, a sub-genre of science fiction, have been chosen to receive this great honor. Higuera pushes the envelope even further by using not just one, but two time frames of speculative fiction, a near future and a far distant time frame of four centuries when most of the plot unfolds.
The novel opens in a desert atmosphere of New Mexico in the year 2061. Readers first meet the 12-year-old protagonist and narrator Petra Peña as she is listening to an ancient Mexican story being shared (in Spanish) by her abuelita (grandmother). Even as this bucolic scene unfolds, readers learn that it may be the final pairing of Petra and her grandmother, Lita. It is a time of great urgency on Earth. An unimagined solar flare has created a cosmic shift of the orbit of a comet (Halley’s) that has safely passed Earth once every 75 years since the beginning of time. In the “present” time, the comet is spinning out of its normal orbit, and it will very soon collide with and destroy planet Earth. Petra’s mother and father have doctorates, respectively, in botany and geology. They are among the few Earth scientists who will travel into the far distant future in search of Sagan, the only planet in the known universe that may resemble Earth sufficiently for the survival of the human race. It is a trip that will take 400 years in Earth time. The Peña scientists are allowed to bring their children, Petra and her young brother, Javier, with them on the incredibly long journey that lies ahead of them. The Global Peace Forum organizes the exodus of chosen Earth survivors. During the 400-year voyage, the sinister and evil Collective evolves. The Collective is a dark totalitarian state (read Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia) that would never allow any passengers onboard who are less than perfect human specimens. Petra’s parents conceal the fact that she is afflicted with the ocular condition known as retinitis pigmentos.
At least two great spaceships from the Pleiades Corp. (“Luxury Living Among the Stars”) are being filled with Earth experts and their children who will travel the extraordinary distance to the planet Sagan in the hope of possible colonization. The behemoth outer space vessels are far larger than football or Olympic stadiums and are many stories high.
Petra, whose only ambition in life is to be a storyteller like her beloved abuelita, cannot bear their parting. Lita is far too old to be able to endure the great physical demands of such a fantastic journey. She will die along with Earth. While Petra’s parents are frantically getting ready to board one of the massive star ships, she is trying to learn as many cuentos (stories) as she possibly can. Lita’s final message to Petra is to always remember the importance of stories.
As the giant space ship leaves the doomed Earth behind, the invited passengers are placed in special accommodations – stasis cubicles – where workers known as Monitors will take care of them during their “nap” of nearly four centuries. In stasis, Monitors make sure that passengers can breathe and do not age.
During the long, long journey through the universe to Sagan. Petra and Javier are monitored in a stasis room designated for children ages six to twelve years. In this state of prolonged rest, a program known as EN COGNITO is used to enable them to become experts in the academic disciplines of their parents; botany and geology in Petra’s case. All memories of an imperfect Earth have been purged. If erasure has failed, the passengers are themselves purged. Any tangible items passengers have attempted to bring from their past lives are collected, labeled as “relics” and seemingly destroyed. The only thing that remains for space travelers is the programmed mantra that their sole reason for being saved is to serve the Collective and its Commander.
Petra awakens 388 years after leaving Earth on July 28, 2061. The giant ship ultimately docks close to the planet Sagan. The youth passengers in her special stasis sleep cubicles awake with no memories of the past. They understand that their sole purpose is to risk their lives to visit and explore the surface of Sagan. A shuttle will transport them to the planet to collect specimens of of plants, rocks, living creatures, and the atmospheric samples. Once back aboard the massive exploratory ship they perform laboratory experiments to determine if the planet Sagan can sustain human life. Danger to the children from the possible existence of life-threatening exposure to poisonous gases, plants, and possible killer animal life on the planet Sagan mean nothing to the Chancellor and the Collective.
Petra is the only passenger who awakens with memories of Earth and secretly discovers relics that are faded and tattered samples of literature once written on her home planet. Most importantly, Petra discovers and recalls thousands of years of human stories. At a critical passage, Petra remembers Lita’s words about the value of storytelling. It is “A doorway to bring lost ones together.” (p. 206)
The special stasis shipmates of Petra – Rubio, Feathers, Suma and Voxy (a stowaway) – only know the scientific knowledge for which they have been programmed during the past 388 years. They have no memory of Earth, nor do they know any stories. They grow to love the stories Petra tells them. Her stories even help them recall some distant memories of their own pasts.
An initial reading of The Last Cuentista may find youthful readers caught up in the science fiction genius and the dystopia of totalitarian rule by the Collective. However, as Higuera’s beautiful narrative is pondered more or read a second or third time, the novel appears increasingly to be more of a seismic conflict between the cold and unfeeling Collective and the courage and goodness of the small cadre of youth explorers.
Because Petra’s abuelita tells her stories in the original Spanish, there are many words and phrases in Spanish. How do readers best find translations? (The novel is not bilingual.) Readers can use context clues to understand passages such as Lita’s colorful story of the fire snake (symbolic of Halley’s Comet) at the end of her cuento. Once on the planet Sagan, Petra also shares with her fellow colonists the uniqueness of culture found in stories. Mexican folklore is filled with “love, humor, pain, magic, lost souls – all woven together to create stories most cultures might sugarcoat.” (p. 243)
In her denouement, Higuera reveals that it is not the number of survivors that will build a new and good life on the planet Sagan. What is important is for the colonizers to experience kindness, joy, caring for each other, and understanding good vs. evil. They also come to realize that “A world without story is lost.” (p.266)
From her Earthly memories, Petra recalls the motto her beloved father taught his children. “We are Peñas. Everything we do from this moment on will bring great pride or great sadness to our ancestors.” (p. 250)
The Last Cuentista is not illustrated, but the separate and unique book cover and dust jacket are stunning, and richly symbolize story elements, including the fire snake.
Home and School Activities
Donna Barba Higuera’s descriptions of the science fiction elements in The Last Cuentista are extraordinarily detailed. Using the author’s exceptional gift for narrative description, invite readers to draw images of the interior and exterior of the gigantic luxury space travel vessel first created by Pleiades Corporation for interstellar travel among the “adventurous elite.”
Encourage students to consider the science fiction elements found in The Last Cuentista. For example, can readers use their own words to describe how Monitors keep passengers alive and ageless for nearly 400 years? What, for example, is stasis? How does it work? How and why is Earth knowledge purged? How are new messages implanted into the minds of young voyagers?
Also based upon the author’s vivid descriptions, encourage readers to create illustrations of the planet Sagan. They might consider its glacier blue lake, moons, dwarf sun, dense forests, and its Jurassic-sized plant leaves. Any media can be used to picture Sagan as Petra, Rubio, Summa and the other child explorers first see it.
One of the virtues of the Newbery Medal is that the honored books never go out of print. Students in 2022 can read the same distinguished books children read in 1922, 1952 or 1982. Encourage readers to read at least one additional Newbery Medal winning book and compare and contrast it with The Last Cuentista. As previously noted, science fiction dystopian novels rarely win the Newbery Medal. One of the most notable and controversial past winners is Lois Lowry’s The Giver (Houghton Mifflin, 1993). Once readers have read both books ask them to compare and contrast the prize-winning novels. One comparison of interest is that the chief protagonists of both novels are 12 years old. In what other ways are Jonas (The Giver) and Petra (The Last Cuentista) similar? Different? Readers can use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast these two exceptionally gifted young characters.
Atinuke. Africa, Amazing Africa: Country by Country. Illus. by Mouni Feddag. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2021. Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review).
