Wednesday, December 29, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger

 



A Snake Falls to Earth is the second young adult novel from Lipan Apache author Darcie Little Badger, after last year's incredible Elatsoe (My review here).  Elatsoe featured a similarly Lipan Apache high school girl as its protagonist in an alternate world in which various types of magic were common, and featured a delightful protagonist and her companions (between her family and her ghost dog Kirby) as well as a plot that dealt with serious themes of persecution, colonization and more.  It was really good and highly acclaimed, so I was surprised how under the radar this follow-up novel seemed to be, even if it does seem targeted at a slightly younger age group (this book straddles the gaps between middle-grade and YA).  

A Snake Falls to Earth is a highly enjoyable story featuring two protagonists - a Lipan Apache girl Nina as she grows up from ages 9 to 16 (mostly from ages 13-16) and an cottonmouth snake animal person Oli in the Reflecting World.  Both worlds are very well done and naturally intersect directly in the final act, as catastrophic events on Earth begin to affect Oli's world and friends, and the two characters join together to try and save and keep alive their loved ones.  The story hits some serious themes - environmental disaster, the loss of culture and history at the hands of colonization - although not as strongly as Elatsoe did, and suffers from at times being a bit more disorganized, but is still a very solid piece of YA more than worth your time, and definitely worth the time of younger readers.  

----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
When Lipan Apache girl Nina was 9 and her great great grandmother Rosita lay dying on a hospital bed, her great great grandmother tried to tell her a story, which Nina tried to understand via a translation app on her phone.  But the story is only in part Spanish, and the other parts seem to be some forgotten Apache dialect that the phone can't quite make out. 

As Nina then grew up, with a mother translating on ships across the world, that story always called to her, with her feeling like it had a connection to her family.  And when Nina's grandmother begins to feel sick every time she leaves her ancestral Texas property, Nina desperately tries to translate the story in hopes it will provide some answers to her grandma's plight. 

At the same time, in a very different world, the Reflecting world filled with spirits, animal people, and monsters, a cottonmouth (snake) kid named Oli is cast out from his home to find his own way.  After a few bumps and turns, he finds a new home of his own on the side of a lake, with friends in a toad, two coyotes twins, and a hawk.  But when one of those friends grows sick due to its species growing near extinction in the real world, Oli makes a desperate trip to the real world to try and save him.  

Their plights will draw Oli and Nina together, animal person and human, as they attempt to save their families from environmental and human disaster, for the sake of a happier future.  
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Snake Falls to Earth essentially tells two alternating storylines for much of the book, with the two only intersecting in the final quarter of the book.  On one hand you have Nina, as she grows up in a world that is like our, but a little bit into the future, with Nina relying upon an Alexa/Siri-esque device to get answers to questions, as well as apps like a smarter translation app and a storytelling video app (ala Tiktok kind of) throughout the book.  On the other hand you have Oli's story in the reflecting world, as he first tries to figure out how to live after being cast out from his mother's home as a snake on his own, makes friends and deals with the monsters and other creatures in his area.  

Oli's story is slightly more cohesive and is a wonderful piece of imagination.  Oli is a warm and friendly being, who just wants to be friendly with his neighbors, whether that be a toad who doesn't speak in a language others can understand or a pair of coyote twins, even if he doesn't feel comfortable becoming fully part of another group (like the coyote twins Risk and Reign's coyote family, to whom Oli is invited to join).  He's also an avid reader of material from our own world, able to read it quickly before it deteriorates like anything real that gets smuggled into his world does within a few days.  And the world his story is set in is wonderfully creative and interesting.  The reflecting world is, like its name, a reflection in some ways of our own world, where animal people spirits' strength is affected by what happens in our own world, such that extinction by human hands results in the same animal spirits dieing off in the reflecting world.  There are animal people and just other animals, to go along with monsters, and the animal people have fun personalities, like the mockingbird who shapeshifts to mess with people she loves, or the young bear bounty hunter doing minor bounty hunting for a bounty of breakfast, or the Catfish cultists who badger and attack those they think are fishing in the lake, etc.  There's even magic (worldshaping) which can have negative effects if used too strongly to go along with all this.  In this world, Oli and his friends are a lot of fun, especially as Oli grows up and then becomes determined to head to our world to save his toad friend.  

By contrast, Nina's world, which we see in pieces as Nina grows up from age 9 to age 16 (with gaps in between) is very recognizable as a potential near future, just one where apps we have now (like Siri, or like TikTok, or translation apps) are a bit more advanced.  Nina is a girl who wants to figure out the mysteries of her family heritage, whether that be the strange untranslatable story of her great great grandma, or her great great grandma's seemingly impossible age of 150, or her grandma's health ties to their old land, or anything else.  And she's a real believer in the stories of animal people and the reflecting world, believing strongly that the strange people who come to her dad's bookshop must be animal people in disguise, something her father refuses to confirm.  At the same time, she's a child growing up mainly with a single parent, with her mom almost always away across the world in her translating job, which hurts her immensely at times, especially as she cares so much about her family.  In fact her family is really everything to her, as she's a bit of a loner without really friends at school, telling her stories online on a storyteller app (ala tiktok) and living more in her imagination than caring about human friends from outside her family.  And so when a hurricane threatens her grandma, it means everything to her and causes her to be desperate to find a way to save her.  

Naturally this results in Nina and Oli coming together to save their loved ones in the end, as well as dealing with a spirit/human being who deliberately tries to destroy the connections between the two worlds.  And this plot generally works, although the connection comes so late that it very much feels rushed.  It's also a bit disorganized with both plotlines, especially Nina's, having plot ideas come up that then never seem to go anywhere, and the time jumps in Nina's story also sometimes make it hard for her feelings and life to have some cohesion (there's a devastating journal entry about Nina's relationship with her mother that is never followed up on).  Still both of the leads are very charming, especially with Little Badger's writing and dialogue, and the story is a tremendous example of writing from a viewpoint and culture that most readers will be less familiar with, and that makes it all very worth it.  If it wasn't for the fact that Little Badger's first book was nearly perfect, I probably wouldn't even have noticed these flaws to pick on here.  

A very strong second work from a great great author.  

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)