Last: The Story of a White Rhino

Written and illustrated by Nicola Davies, Last: The Story of a White Rhino tells the tale of Sudan, one of the last Northern White Rhinos in existence. In an attempt to save his kind from extinction, he is captured in 1975 and transported to a zoo in the Czech Republic. Just five years later, all of the Northern White Rhinos outside of captivity have perished.

Sudan remembers the glorious days of freedom when the little ones played, and he walked alongside his mama through the African terrain. He recalls her scent: “She smelled beautiful.” Twenty-four long years pass before he is finally released into the wild where he joins the only other two Northern White Rhinos left alive. He dies in 2018, but through this story, his legacy remains.

This is a magnificent book. It speaks of the beauty these creatures behold and shows how profoundly human selfishness and cruelty can affect the survival of a species. Uniquely, many of the illustrations have advertising slogans and words from environmental speeches sketched within them. Though young children may not fully understand them, they are likely to generate curiosity and appear in a variety of different languages. The content of the story will be of relative ease for those who read at a second-grade level to decode. The target audience for this captivating narrative is children ages five to nine, and youth whose hearts go out to animals, and the preservation of them will cherish it.