A Snake Falls to Earth: Newbery Honor Award Winner

by Darcie Little Badger

Nina often wondered if she’d like the Earth one hundred years from now. The future could be a wondrous place of androids, cloned dinosaurs, and VR glasses. That’s what Nina wanted to believe. However, when the anxious hum of the evening news slipped into her bedroom, carrying prophesies of disease and pain, it seemed more likely that the future would be a place of nightmares.

To her, the emptiness and silence were home. This wasn’t a ghost town. Not when the heart of her family still beat within the land.

the water was deep enough to hide plenty of secrets.

She loved the smell of the room: old paper and suggestions of the books’ former homes. Candles, perfume, spices, smoke, air freshener, coffee. As if each used book carried the ghost of whatever library or drawing room it had come from.