Darcie Little Badger's Elatsoe
I first read about Darcie Little Badger’s YA novel Elatsoe in Alexandra Alter’s 2020 essay on Native American and First Nations writers who are writing speculative fiction (‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi”). I was intrigued by Alter’s description of why Little Badger, a Lipan Apache writer, feels drawn to this genre: “[S]he wanted to write about young Indigenous characters in an alternative, magic-filled, contemporary America because so much fiction featuring Native characters is historical and feels outdated.”
I was not disappointed. This is a very cool book. Little Badger notes in the book bio that she is “a fan of the weird, beautiful, and haunting,” and I believe it. From the very beginning, we dive headfirst into a world that is undeniably our own but also, as the jacket copy aptly states, “slightly stranger …. This America [has] been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not.” Often I read fantastic-sounding jacket copy and blurbs and feel the book doesn’t live up to the hype; that is not the case here.
Like J.K. Rowling, Little Badger has a knack for finding evocative, interesting, and often amusing details in both her “real” world and her strange one. The book’s first two paragraphs:
“Ellie bought the life-sized plastic skull at a garage sale (the goth neighbors were moving to Salem, and they could not fit an entire Halloween warehouse into their black van). After bringing the purchase home, she dug through her box of craft supplies and glued a pair of googly eyes in its shallow eye sockets.
‘I got you a new friend, Kirby!’ Ellie said. ‘Here, boy! C’mon!” Kirby already fetched tennis balls and puppy toys. Sure, anything looked astonishing when it zipped across the room in the mouth of an invisible dog, but a floating googly skull would be extra special.’”
The dog is a ghost and Ellie is the one who raised its spirit from the dead. But she also has a box of googly eyes and frequents garage sales. Little Badger weaves together the world we know and the slightly off-kilter world she’s introducing with such ease that the effect is wonderfully discombobulating. At times, her ease—she feels so comfortable here—makes me feel almost uneasy, which in turn makes me feel I’ve truly landed in another place. My experience of reading Elatsoe reminded me of reading the marvelous stories of British-Nigerian-American writer Lesley Nneka Arimah (Arimah was born in the UK, grew up in Nigeria, but now lives in the U.S., so I don’t know exactly which term to use). I remember feeling, when I brought Arimah’s collection What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky to a coffee shop to read it, that there was some kind of live animal or electric thing zinging around in my backpack.
Ellie (Elatsoe’s) world is filled with both deep familial love and friendship (please excuse the copious references, but good books always make me think of my experience of reading other good books; Little Badger’s descriptions of family relationships remind me of those in Madeline L’Engle’s Austin family series, another of my favorites). But there are also great dangers here. These dangers unfold in a story and plot that feel for the most part sure-footed, though there were a few places where I felt that the structure or pacing of how a scene played out, or how one scene led to another, couldn’t quite land on a satisfying rhythm; this meant, for me, that sometimes, great details lost their oomph, particularly in action scenes. Maybe part of the issue is that I want dramatic, dangerous, and evocative moments to slice a little more cleanly, take my breath away. Sometimes instead they get lost in sentences with metaphors, adjectives, and lots of commas, as in this description of a ghostly piano:
“The piano flew up as if seized by a tornado, sailed over Dr. Allerton, and plummeted toward the now-screaming crowd.”
To be clear: I love metaphors, adjectives, and commas, and often use them to excess in my own work. But I felt that I wanted to see sentences like this one get stripped down or broken up somehow to highlight tense moments.
These are mostly prose-level quibbles. Little Badger’s imaginative powers are superb. I’m looking forward to reading her second novel, A Snake Falls to Earth.
Elatsoe
I was not disappointed. This is a very cool book. Little Badger notes in the book bio that she is “a fan of the weird, beautiful, and haunting,” and I believe it. From the very beginning, we dive headfirst into a world that is undeniably our own but also, as the jacket copy aptly states, “slightly stranger …. This America [has] been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not.” Often I read fantastic-sounding jacket copy and blurbs and feel the book doesn’t live up to the hype; that is not the case here.
Like J.K. Rowling, Little Badger has a knack for finding evocative, interesting, and often amusing details in both her “real” world and her strange one. The book’s first two paragraphs:
“Ellie bought the life-sized plastic skull at a garage sale (the goth neighbors were moving to Salem, and they could not fit an entire Halloween warehouse into their black van). After bringing the purchase home, she dug through her box of craft supplies and glued a pair of googly eyes in its shallow eye sockets.
‘I got you a new friend, Kirby!’ Ellie said. ‘Here, boy! C’mon!” Kirby already fetched tennis balls and puppy toys. Sure, anything looked astonishing when it zipped across the room in the mouth of an invisible dog, but a floating googly skull would be extra special.’”
The dog is a ghost and Ellie is the one who raised its spirit from the dead. But she also has a box of googly eyes and frequents garage sales. Little Badger weaves together the world we know and the slightly off-kilter world she’s introducing with such ease that the effect is wonderfully discombobulating. At times, her ease—she feels so comfortable here—makes me feel almost uneasy, which in turn makes me feel I’ve truly landed in another place. My experience of reading Elatsoe reminded me of reading the marvelous stories of British-Nigerian-American writer Lesley Nneka Arimah (Arimah was born in the UK, grew up in Nigeria, but now lives in the U.S., so I don’t know exactly which term to use). I remember feeling, when I brought Arimah’s collection What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky to a coffee shop to read it, that there was some kind of live animal or electric thing zinging around in my backpack.
Ellie (Elatsoe’s) world is filled with both deep familial love and friendship (please excuse the copious references, but good books always make me think of my experience of reading other good books; Little Badger’s descriptions of family relationships remind me of those in Madeline L’Engle’s Austin family series, another of my favorites). But there are also great dangers here. These dangers unfold in a story and plot that feel for the most part sure-footed, though there were a few places where I felt that the structure or pacing of how a scene played out, or how one scene led to another, couldn’t quite land on a satisfying rhythm; this meant, for me, that sometimes, great details lost their oomph, particularly in action scenes. Maybe part of the issue is that I want dramatic, dangerous, and evocative moments to slice a little more cleanly, take my breath away. Sometimes instead they get lost in sentences with metaphors, adjectives, and lots of commas, as in this description of a ghostly piano:
“The piano flew up as if seized by a tornado, sailed over Dr. Allerton, and plummeted toward the now-screaming crowd.”
To be clear: I love metaphors, adjectives, and commas, and often use them to excess in my own work. But I felt that I wanted to see sentences like this one get stripped down or broken up somehow to highlight tense moments.
These are mostly prose-level quibbles. Little Badger’s imaginative powers are superb. I’m looking forward to reading her second novel, A Snake Falls to Earth.
Elatsoe
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