The Last One

Starred review from May 9, 2016
The TV show Survivor meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in Oliva’s stellar debut. One of the 12 contestants on In the Dark, a reality show set in the remote Pennsylvania wilderness and billed as a “reality experience of unprecedented scale,” is Zoo, so called by the show’s producers because she works at a wildlife sanctuary and rehabilitation center. Zoo decided to go on In the Dark as one last big adventure before settling down to start a family with her husband. The host explains that the game is a race with no finish line; the only way out is to quit. Trouble arrives in the form of an unidentified pathogen that begins to kill off a substantial portion of the world’s population. Alone on an extended solo challenge, Zoo has no idea that the lines between reality and reality show have been blurred into nonexistence. Fueled by brilliantly intimate and insightful writing as well as an endearing and fully realized female lead, this apocalyptic novel draws its power from Zoo’s realizations about society and herself as she struggles to survive long enough to somehow make it back to her home and, hopefully, her husband. Agent: Lucy Carson, Friedrich Agency.

May 1, 2016
A young woman's participation in a survival reality show conceals an actual apocalyptic event in the outside world. Telling herself that she is after one last big adventure before starting a family, Zoo (as she is dubbed by producers) decides to participate in a hard-core wilderness survival show. The novel's first narrative strand takes us through the show's initial week: we see a series of group and solo challenges, such as tracking animals and filtering water, accomplished in order to earn prizes. We are also introduced to the reality show contestants, who are called by easy-label names like Asian Chick and Air Force. Zoo quickly rises as a leader among the contestants--she's easy to get along with and has "moxie." But intercut with the narrative of the show's first week is that of Zoo alone, on what she believes is a long solo challenge. Thinking that the production team has cleared out entire towns and strategically placed corpselike "props" (complete with the smell of decay), Zoo moves east in the direction of her home, determined to be the last one standing and the winner of the $1 million prize. In her debut novel, Oliva has written a book that is clever in the best sense: she is able to skewer reality show culture and dystopian tropes while never letting concept or critique become more important than a good yarn. The novel is thoroughly steeped in its times--the use of a Reddit-like forum plays a key plot role--but unlike other dystopian novels, it doesn't so much use contemporary times to warn us about potential future collapse as it shows what impact our times have on the ways we think about identity and human relationships. An astute and compelling entry into the post-apocalypse genre.

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May 1, 2016
Zoo, a nature-preserve educator, joined the cast of the reality show In the Dark to experience a final solo adventure before starting a family. The competition is set in a large forest, and the cast, selected for maximum volatility, competes to win food and survival tools. With fierce determination and some basic survival skills, Zoo emerges as a top contender. After their small teams split into solo challenges, Zoo notices a dark shift in the producers' reality-bending machinations: disappearing cameramen, torturously long periods of solitude, and even horrifically realistic fake bodies planted in her path. But when Zoo encounters Brennan, whom she quickly pegs as an artfully inserted replacement cameraman, his despairing stories of pandemic disease and mass chaos force Zoo to question her perceptions about what she has witnessed while stumbling toward the show's finish line. Part wilderness-survival thriller and part dystopian pandemic story, Oliva's debut is a gripping portrayal of an ordinary person's evolving survival instincts as she realizes that she can't trust the reality she sees.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)