Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for letting me listen to an ARC of this audio book. Suzy Jackson's narration was excellent, easy to follow, clear, and didn't try hard to be brilliant which made the voices authentic. The chapters go back and forth between Paris and Alcatraz yet it was easy to keep up with the timelines.
I can't really tell you why I loved this book. It's about a zoo and people who love animals. It's the last zoo on earth which made me sad and I was cheering for anything that saved the animals. Of course, there weren't cats and dogs but real zoo animals and I fell in love with them.
Camille and Sailor are our heroines and they are charming and believable. And committed. So where do animals go if when they aren't in cages?
The whole book was charming, crept up on me, grabbed me, and I didn't want it to end.
From the blurb: "The Island of Last Things is an elegy for a disappearing world and a gorgeous vision for the future."

Engaging, immersive, and utterly original. A recommended purchase in all formats for all public fiction collections.

Emma Sloley’s The Island of Last Things reimagines Alcatraz as one of the most unique settings imaginable—a prison transformed into a last zoo, in a world where the wild is mostly gone and the animals are few but precious. Camille, the quiet zookeeper who prefers caring for chimpanzees, tree frogs, and a restless jaguar over talking to people, has found her steady rhythm in routines that feel safer than human company.

Then along struts Sailor, a Florida-raised, Paris-trained, rule-bending new keeper with a radical heart. She sees something in Camille and spins her world on its axis. Their bond, electric and unsettling, lures Camille out of her quiet existence—and onto a reckless quest when Sailor reveals her plan to smuggle an animal to a rumored sanctuary beyond the island.

It’s tender, it’s tense, and yes—it’s thoroughly unlikely that you’ll ever view Alcatraz, or an alligator in captivity, quite the same way again.

In a dystopian future where creatures (including Homo sapiens) vie for the lowest building block of needs in Maslow’s theory of hierarchy, Camille zookeeps in one of the remaining zoos in the world. Camille needs this job on Alcatraz, “retrofitted as a high security animal conservation project by some pharma industry billionaires,” because she needs to support her mom financially. Thankfully, Camille cares about the island’s inhabitants with an innocent wonder and a protective instinct for the world’s remaining solitary animals.

The zoo’s new hire, Sailor, transfers from the Paris Zoo, which could not keep its doors open, and Sailor quickly befriends Camille. Both women want what’s best for the animals, but Sailor’s more radical approach to preserving wildlife (i.e., freeing the animals from the zoo’s captivity) will push Camille’s boundaries. Camille gradually adopts Sailor’s understanding of the animals’ rights to live freely in light of the zoo owner’s greedy scheme of running his enterprise like a circus, charging guests for a spectacle at the animals’ expense.

Unbeknownst to Camille, a man in SF is blackmailing Sailor, demanding she smuggle an animal for him to sell on the black market. Framing the breakout as “setting the alligator free” and bringing it to a superior living space, Camille watches in horror as Sailor sacrifices her life so that the alligator can eat real meat and simultaneously ends her obligation to her blackmailer.

I appreciated Sloley’s thought experiment on the consequences of the dwindling of natural resources and the effects on creatures, both extinct and the last of their kind. I’m reminded I need to brush up on Singer’s sentientism, contra speciesism, which Sailor’s death suggests. The metaphorical incarceration of animals and the world-building within the federal penitentiary kept me engaged, though the two women’s back stories leading up to their time at Alcatraz required more development. For example, detailing Camille’s relationship with her late dad and absent mom would fill out her character. And, Sailor, hailing from Paris without strings attached to anyone, confused me, not to mention her repeated ability to evade management’s punitive measures despite her raucous behavior.

I rate The Island of Last Things 2.5 stars and round up to 3 because of Sloley’s teeming-with-life writing. My thanks to Flatiron Books and NetGalley for an ARC. I shared this review on GoodReads on August 30, 2025 (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7821450858).

To be honest, I picked this one at first due to the beautiful cover. It is set in the dystopian future, where war and extreme global climate change have wrecked havoc in the world. Because of that, many of the native animals of the earth and their habitats were destroyed. The world building of Alcatraz Island and the character building made this novel for me. Is it fast paced exactly? No, but the ending was definitely a Suprise.

The ending of this had me speechless!! I was definitely not expecting that!! 3.5 stars!!

This dystopian novel is about two zookeepers who work at the last zoo in the world on Alcatraz island. Our main character Camille definitely has the "follow the rules" / innocent mindset, until she meets newcomer, Sailor, and is instantly drawn to her. They bond over their love of the animals and the dreams of going back to a healthier society where the animals can live in their natural habitats, and quickly become close friends. Little does Camille know Sailor has a different agenda up her sleeve.

This story was heartbreaking, hopeful, dystopian, and gave me so many mixed emotions and grief for the animals. Overall a greatly written story and I cannot get over the ending!!

Thank you so much Macmillan Audio & Netgalley for the ARC!! All thoughts are my own :)

Purpose of Alcatraz never changes. Once a prison for people, now is a "zoo" for the last of all animals. I would love to compare it to Noah's Arc, but naming it Alcatraz did not allow me to make it. As the wilderness died, animals (if they were not captured by wealthy people as a token) were collected from all over the world and placed into various zoos. They were meant to be protected in these places but of course humans would always have a hidden agenda

Camille was one of the caretakers at Alcatraz. She loved these animals more than anything else in the world. She did not know of the world outside this zoo and how people were trying to steal these animals. One day a new caretaker joined the team from Paris and all she was talking about was freeing these animals. To Camille, this was the worst idea in the world but Sailor was changing her more than she could imagine.

I appreciated this different take on ecofiction. I have read some dystopian books about how the future can be horrible, but none of those necessarily focus on species besides humans. This storyline brought animals to the center of this dystopia. If you are interested in reading about a failing environment and humans continue to be humans, this is an alternative take.

I struggled a bit with the premise of this book and had a hard time getting past it. It is an engaging read with a lovely little twist at the the end though.

I loved the way this story moved. There wasn't a dull moment, constantly pulling me back in till I couldn't believe I was finished. It's a great story told in a beautiful way.

Wow, this is so tough for me to rate because I found it so bleak and absolutely depressing, but I can't stop thinking about it! The ending was fantastic and while I wasn't in LOVE with the story, I find it so fascinating and well done and will recommend it to many people.

Grief and hope intermingle in this speculative near-future where species are being eradicated by habitat destruction and climate change. The Island of Last Things takes place on/in Alcatraz, now repurposed into a private zoo owned by big pharma billionaires. Two zookeepers imagine a better future and take risks to see it come true.

I had so many feelings while listening to this book. There is a deep love for animals enmeshed in the words, and also a profound sorrow at the all-too-realistic potential fate of our living world. I wept about the reality of my own world reflected in this story. The narration was steady and fitting for the story. The ending was shocking to me, and I had to rewind to listen to it a few times to fully grasp what was going on.

A sense of individual responsibility is both magnified and minimized by this story. There is a quote about how small we have to shrink our dreams to fit them into the reality of our lives that really struck me. We each have such grand dreams as children, that we will be the one to change the world with our individual pursuits and contributions—but the reality of our lives forces us to conform like bonsai trees or goldfish, constrained by our environment and circumstances. We still can affect change, and though it may be in much smaller ways than we originally imagined, it’s no less important.

I’m reminded of the parable of the boy throwing starfish back into the sea; when he is confronted with the reality that he can’t possibly save them all, he isn’t discouraged. He just says, “I can make a difference to this one,” as he throws another into the water.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for this audio ARC via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Oof, I didn't finish. There is nothing terribly wrong with it but the characters are annoying me and the story is kind of dragging on. Others may enjoy but it's not for me.

A character-driven novel about the last zoo in the world, The Island of Last Things is a melancholy look at female friendship and a plausible future.

If you don’t mind a story that takes its time building and is more about character than plot, you will enjoy this. And especially if you love animals and dystopian novels.

The writing is gorgeous. There are tons of animal-related similes and metaphors in the novel, but they never feel gratuitous or ridiculous. It flows beautifully and it's so highly descriptive. You could picture the animals so precisely that it was like being at the zoo.

What I enjoyed about this novel too, is how insular it is. We see a little bit about the outside world, but the outside world isn’t really the point. Rather than get bogged down about how the world was functioning on the outside, politically and socially, we are restricted to Alcatraz and a few scenes outside. This served as a deep look into how one facet of society reacted or worked within the new world order, and I thought not knowing so much about the external world worked really well.

The inside of Alcatraz is very well-built, with lots of focus on how the animals live and are treated, and how the facility has been altered to become a zoo.

The book shows us a community in microcosm, and that also relates to the characters. Camille has good growth over the story, but in a different way than I expected. I guessed where the general plot would go, but the smaller, more nuanced elements I did not, nor the ending.

The characters are layered and realistic - Camille and Sailor; I can tell you tons about their personalities - and not just the main characters. There isn’t a huge cast, but of the others we get, they also felt real. I don’t think I loved either of the women, but how they played off one another worked really well.

I also, of course, loved the themes of animal welfare and conservationism. It was quite sad. It was also a story about radicalism, activism, and trust. There’s a lot going on, and I thought the book approached it quite well.

Overall, if you like dystopian novels that info-dump to you about why the dystopia happened, you might not enjoy this, but if you like a sort of slice-of-life story in a possible future, you should check it out.

Emma Sloley’s The Island of Last Things is one of those novels that feels both intimate and sweeping at the same time. On the surface, it’s about the last zoo in the world, improbably located on Alcatraz, where Camille spends her days tending to the few remaining creatures: chimps, frogs, and a restless jaguar. But beneath that, it’s a story about what it means to keep caring for fragile things in a world that seems determined to let them vanish.

This isn’t your typical dystopian novel—don’t expect nonstop action or elaborate worldbuilding outside the island. Instead, Sloley zooms in close, letting us sit with Camille’s quiet rituals and her growing connection with Sailor, the new arrival who disrupts her carefully ordered life. Their relationship is tender, complicated, and sometimes unsettling, pulling the book into psychological territory as much as ecological. I loved how the novel balances the personal and the political, showing us that the smallest choices can ripple outward in dangerous and unexpected ways.

The prose is stunning—lyrical without ever being overdone. Alcatraz itself becomes a paradox: a sanctuary, a prison, a symbol of both survival and confinement. Sloley wrings every ounce of atmosphere from it. The pacing is slow and contemplative, but I found it engaging rather than frustrating. You don’t race through this book; you sink into it.

The theme also, is impossible to shake: the way humanity relates to the natural world. The book is part elegy, part love letter, and part warning. It asks uncomfortable questions about whether saving something in captivity is really saving it at all. I found myself thinking about it long after I finished.

The audiobook deserves a spotlight, too. Suzy Jackson’s narration is beautifully matched to the material. She has this quiet clarity that makes Camille’s introspection feel even more raw, and she shifts just enough in tone and cadence to capture Sailor’s restless energy without ever overplaying it. Jackson gives the story room to breathe, leaning into its moments of melancholy and fragile hope.

Overall, The Island of Last Things is not a book you’ll forget easily. It’s haunting, strange, and gorgeously written, with an emotional resonance that lingers.

The last zoo on earth is on Alcatraz Island and Camille has been content to pass her days there safely taking care of the world’s last animals while chaos reigns around the world. When a new zoo keeper arrives, Camille is challenged with ideas of a secret haven for free animals, and must decide if finding it is worth the risks. This book reminds us of the importance of a world with animals and challenges us to think about consequences and risks associated with our ever-changing Earth. It was a good read that made me dissect our current state as humanity, and I love books that make me think and dig deeper within my own mind and perspective. Many thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the ALC. These opinions are my own.

A good, solid dystopian story about a world in which animals no longer roam free and are sequestered in zoos until the point of extinction. Excellent narrator. Listened on 1.5x speed. Gives a good indication of the symbiotic relationship between humans and animals. First person narrative with some secondary 3rd person chapters every now and again. But ultimately, it fell a little flat for me. I didn't find myself emotionally involved or caring overmuch about the characters. I think it's giving dystopian vibes and was just, ultimately, ok. However I didn't feel the stakes were high enough. Shuddering to think about a world without animals for sure, but this book was missing something in shock value for me and didn't ultimately give me the punch I was looking for.

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ALC.

This book has a great premise about the last zoo at the end of the world. It was really nice seeing Camille and Sailor's interaction with the animals. The ending was super unexpected and saddening. Sadly, things fell flat during the execution. In a supposedly dystopian setting, I wanted to see more of the world building, like how all the animals went extinct, why and how is there a highly protected zoo on Alcatraz etc. I understand that the author wanted to send a message about zoos, animal extinction and illegal trade but I wanted more from the story itself. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a book about zoos and people's interaction with animals.

The narrator did a great job but it would have been nicer if the emotional parts were read out with more emotion.

This story ended up being different than I had anticipated. Overall, it was okay but it was missing something for me. Interesting story with a surprise ending that I did appreciate.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for an ALC.

This book really surprised me. I was not expecting much from it and it was slightly outside my comfort zone, but it read contemporary with obvious dystopian themes. I clicked in with the characters and was absorbed in their journey and the huge ending. I’m glad I took the time!

This was a slow look through a lens with a film of future societal and global decay. The last zoo on earth is on Alcatraz island and the animals and care takers have to live inside the prison. The day to day “new normal” behaviors of both the animals and the people was fascinating and devastating in how easily we give our freedoms and how quickly we line up for capitalism.
This was a slow paced novel that promotes deep thought on many ethical issues. And while I did find myself wishing we were given more of a “back story” the longer I sit with it, the easier I find that my own mind can fill in the blanks.