THE LAST ONE
by Alexandra Oliva
I wish I’d written this ...
... because it injects terror into an overly familiar TV format.
This novel’s greatest strength will also be, for some readers, its greatest weakness. The story follows a female contestant—"Zoo"—on a survival-themed reality show. During its production, a flu-like virus kills half the world’s population, but Zoo, isolated in the woods, doesn’t know this, and as she wanders eastward, thinking she’s involved in one of the game’s many challenges, she starts to encounter evidence of the pandemic but mistakes it for either props or production team manipulations. The loss of her spectacles and resultant shortsightedness does much to protect her from the reality of the situation, which was a smart move by the author, and one that helps with the theme of emotional distance. However, herein lies the potential problem: Zoo is separated from reality by her belief that it’s all manufactured, by her inability to properly see it, by being far from her husband and home (her "real" reality), and by her near constant state of exhaustion (which in the last few chapters gives way to shock), and unfortunately this sense of detachment is so well rendered by the author that, for the reader, it can be infectious. It’s a struggle to feel properly engaged with Zoo and her tribulations (though it gets easier toward the end). I didn’t mind this so much, but I can see how it might prove a major hurdle for a lot of people. Nevertheless, I’d definitely recommend this one. I enjoyed it a lot, and thought it very cleverly done.
From the publisher
Survival is the name of the game as the line blurs between reality TV and reality itself in Alexandra Oliva’s fast-paced novel of suspense.
She wanted an adventure. She never imagined it would go this far.
It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens—but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it human-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them—a young woman the show’s producers call Zoo—stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game.
Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life—and husband—she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills—and learn new ones as she goes.
But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways—and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.
Sophisticated and provocative, The Last One is a novel that forces us to confront the role that media plays in our perception of what is real: how readily we cast our judgments, how easily we are manipulated.
