York City park and sing songs to herself. One day, a stranger accosts her, drags her underneath a tree, and rapes her. Because the college students have such an uneasy relationship with the police, she does not report it. Instead, once she learns of the crime, Ann gives Georgette over to her radical friend, Sasha, who drives Georgette home to her parents’ house and gives her some heroin so she can forget about the rape by getting high. Georgette does not know that as Sasha does this, she also plans on robbing her parents’ house as Georgette sleeps upstairs. When her parents arrive the next morning and find Georgette unconscious, they do not know whether to report their daughter to the police or not. As Georgette looks back on the event later, she realizes that more complicated emotional issues were at stake, aspects she avoided at the time of the rape, in part because of the political turmoil of the air.

One of the novel’s subplots concerns Georgette’s sister Solange, who runs away from her abusive mother and begins to hitchhike across the United States soon after the 1969 Woodstock music festival. Here, Nunez takes a subject such as teenage runaways and dwells on it sociologically, only to upend any generalizations by turning to the emotional immediacy of Solange’s story. For instance, Georgette dwells on the statistical probabilities of what might have happened to her runaway sister during the years she is missing in the narrative, but then the reader learns that Solange actually had a good time at first in the heady days just after Woodstock.

Solange has an innocent beauty that endears her to passing strangers, so she travels across the country several times, enjoying her freedom from her abusive mother. While this idyllic hippie idyll does not last, Solange still wants to celebrate the possibility of people being “so generous, so warm, and openhearted.” As she puts it, “You could travel anywhere at all, you could knock on someone’s door, tell them I’m a friend of so-and-so, and they would take you right in. . . . We really believed we could create a new world.” To be fair, Nunez quickly itemizes Solange’s subsequent fragile mental and physical health, her drug use, and her suicide attempts, but still Solange’s experiences complicate any easy condemning of the hippie lifestyle. Often, Nunez finds ways to encapsulate both sides of the story, such as when Solange’s groupie worship of rock star Mick Jagger leads her to witness the violence at the 1969 Altamont music festival. There is little transition between her lulling appreciation of the Rolling Stones’ music and the Hells Angels’ killings of several audience members.

As the novel shifts into the 1970’s, Ann takes on an African American lover named Kwame Kwesi, who teaches younger children in an inner city school. Ann’s relationship with Kwame could have lasted in idealized defiance of the status quo, but their activist culture clashes against the establishment one day when two policemen pull over Kwame on his motorcycle in view of an activist’s loft, where Ann is staying. As Ann watches from a window above, Kwame refuses to kneel before the policemen, and one of them pulls out a gun. The hostilities increase until Ann grabs a gun and, thinking that Kwame is about to get shot, shoots one of the policemen in the head, killing him. The other policeman then shoots Kwame in the back, and Ann immediately gives herself up to the police. Inside of the illegal loft space, police then find weapons, illegal drugs, and “literature calling for the overthrow of the government, death to the police, and death to the rich.” It turns out that Ann and Kwame were just staying at a friend’s apartment, but the radical literature further hurts her case, and Ann ends up serving time for killing a policeman. The press takes a strong interest in her case, making comparisons between her story and that of heiress Patty Hearst but also noting how much public opinion has shifted away from political activism now that the Vietnam War has ended.

Through much of the rest of the novel, Georgette tries to understand Ann, who remains defiant until the end of her days in prison. There is irony in the way Ann has an extreme identification with the poor and the disenfranchised, but when it comes to the family of a policeman she murdered, she has no visible remorse. Ann’s charity extends to African Americans, the servants, and the poor, but she has little concern for the suffering she might inflict on others who do not fit her ideological agenda. Ironically, Ann may have been considered a saint in another context. Even at a young age, she cared so deeply about a homeless man that she had tried to carry food and a blanket back to him, even though she saw him miles away from home. While Ann categorically rejects her parents in spite of their unwavering support for her, Georgette eventually strikes up a romantic relationship with Ann’s father, Turner, after Ann’s mother dies.

Through Georgette’s discussions with Turner, the reader learns how Ann never forgave her parents for finding ways to rationalize the advantages of their place in society. To try to help understand Ann, Nunez includes a discussion of Simone Weil, the Jewish philosopher who shares with Ann a dislike of pleasure while others are suffering. In her way, Ann cannot compromise, and even though her position leads her to prison, her stand has a moral force even amid its unconscious hypocrisies.

Late in the novel, Georgette marries a critic and editor of a literary journal. Thanks to her efforts as its assistant editor, she manages to publish an anonymous inmate’s memoir concerning the later years of Ann’s incarceration. The inmate’s voice is considerably different from Georgette’s, but because the rest of the novel has circled around Ann, the inmate’s narrative supplies another point of view of the same mystery. Because Ann thinks all Americans are political prisoners anyway, she serves her time without complaint, once again excelling as a political advocate for prisoners. Ironically, “Orphan Annie,” as she is called, continues to earn the same resentment from those she has tried to help as before. Ann suffers harassment from the people she romanticized earlier, and Nunez leaves it up to the reader to decide whether Ann has wasted her life seeking to redress her extreme sense of injustice. In terms of the larger narrative, the abrupt shift to prison life keeps the novel tense and unpredictable to the end.

Throughout The Last of Her Kind, Nunez tries to encapsulate what it felt like to live through such tumultuous social change from the inside while contrasting it with the very different and often judgmental perspectives of the period afterward. As Nunez puts it, “I never wanted to write about the sixties in any abstract way. I wanted to write about specific individuals who happened to come of age in that revolutionary time.” In the process, Nunez guides the reader away from easy generalizations about the era, acknowledging the joys of so much radical change but also the long-term moral effects of a generation’s attempt to reinvent itself.