I'd had <i>The History of Bees</i> on my to-read list for years when I saw this book come up on NetGalley, so I requested it thinking it'd be good motivation to read the series. I liked <i>Bees</i>, but I didn't love it, and knowing what I know about the structure of the two subsequent books I probably would not have continued with the series without the obligation to review this for NetGalley. As such, I did skip <i>The End of the Ocean</i>, but I feel justified in that -- the books are all independent enough that you're not missing anything if you read them out of order or skipping one or more. (I glean from other reviews that a minor character here also appears in <i>The End of the Ocean</i>, but that's the sum total of the crossover as far as I'm aware.)

<i>The Last Wild Horses</i> follows a familiar format for anyone who read any of its predecessors - three stories set in three time periods (a-few-hundred-years-ago past, present or recent past, and climate-change-dystopic future) with alternating chapters, unified around an environmental or zoological theme. Where <i>The History of Bees</i> had (appropriately) bees, this book has (appropriately), horses, specifically "Przewalski's horse", a unique species of wild horse native to Mongolia. Unlike <i>Bees</i>, which did eventually reveal its three storylines to be linked (if only in the most tenuous ways) these storylines are really only unified by their shared interest in Przewalski's horse. As such, your enjoyment of the book is going to be strongly correlated to your interest in horses.

Unfortunately for the book, I don't really care much about horses, so all the characters waxing rhapsodic about how much they are invested in particular horses fell on deaf ears. On the other hand, two of the three storylines are tied to real-life moments in the historical relationship between humans and these horses (the capture of the initial population of captive specimens of the horses in the late 1800s, and the 1990s reintroduction into Mongolia of captive horses after the species had gone extinct in the wild), and the nuts and bolts of these historical attempts were pretty interesting even if I didn't care about the human characters populating the stories. This meant the last story, featuring a woman living on a defunct zoological preserve/farm who is struggling to balance the moral urge to keep her two Przewalski's horses alive and healthy (yet in captivity) with the more immediate need to find food and medicine for herself and her daughter in a society that is breaking down, was the least interesting to me as I continued to not connect to the human characters and also didn't have the baseline interest in historical conservation efforts.

I really wanted to like this book. Normally I really enjoy varying time lines in a story but this fell flat.

I’ll go with 3.5 stars here. There were a lot of problems with the stories themselves. The writing was fantastic and keeps the reader entertained. But something bothered me about all three of the stories. The ending was unsatisfying to say the least

I really wanted to like this book, but after Eva lets Louise into her house and home despite all that she’s done and endured to keep herself and her daughter safe, I was out. It was so stupid. I could see why her daughter was furious. After having her life defined by fear, it would be the last straw to have her mother do something so rash and risky.

I like the concept of the book, but I couldn’t finish it.

Maja Lunde used three vary different time periods to tell the story about the Equus Przewalskii Poliakov. I also went to the Brookfield Zoo and saw the horses there and compare them to the Zebras, neither can be domesticated. The first story was about Eva in Norway and the end of what we know of the world in 2064. The second was from the period around 1882 in Petersburg, Russia with Mikhail Alexandrovich Kovrov. The third was with Karin in Germany after WWII and in 1992 and in Mongolia. Each of these people were taken by these wild horses and had things happened to them that would change the way we see the horses today. It has a rather somber ending that was fitting in with story. I liked it and gave it 4 out of 5 stars.