Overview
Locus Award Winner--Best First NovelA National Indie BestsellerNebula Award FinalistLodestar Award FinalistIgnyte Award FinalistTIME's Best 100 Fantasy Books of All TimeNPR Best of the YearBooklist's Top 10 First Novels for YouthA BookPage Best of the YearChicago Public Library "Best of the Best"PNBA BestsellerPublishers Weekly Best of the YearBuzzfeed's Best YA SFF of the YearShelf-Awareness Best of the YearAICL Best YA of the YearNECBA Windows & Mirrors SelectionNEIBA Award FinalistTor Best of the YearKirkus Best YA of the YearPublishers Weekly Flying StartAmerican Indian Youth Literature Award Finalist "Groundbreaking."--TIME "Deeply enjoyable from start to finish."--NPR "Utterly magical."--SyFyWire "Atmospheric and lyrical...a gorgeous work of art."--BuzzFeed "One of the best YA debuts of 2020. Read it."--Marieke Nijkamp ★ "A fresh voice and perspective."--Booklist, starred review ★ "A unique and powerful Native American voice."--BookPage, starred review ★ "A brilliant, engaging debut."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review ★ "A fast-paced murder mystery."--Publishers Weekly, starred review ★ "A Lipan Apache Sookie Stackhouse for the teen set."--Shelf-Awareness, starred review A Texas teen comes face-to-face with a cousin's ghost and vows to unmask the murderer. Elatsoe--Ellie for short--lives in an alternate contemporary America shaped by the ancestral magics and knowledge of its Indigenous and immigrant groups. She can raise the spirits of dead animals--most importantly, her ghost dog Kirby. When her beloved cousin dies, all signs point to a car crash, but his ghost tells her otherwise: He was murdered. Who killed him and how did he die? With the help of her family, her best friend Jay, and the memory great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother, Elatsoe, must track down the killer and unravel the mystery of this creepy town and it's dark past. But will the nefarious townsfolk and a mysterious Doctor stop her before she gets started? A breathtaking debut novel featuring an asexual, Apache teen protagonist, Elatsoe combines mystery, horror, noir, ancestral knowledge, haunting illustrations, fantasy elements, and is one of the most-talked about debuts of the year.
Details
- ISBN-13: 9781646140053
- ISBN-10: 1646140052
- Publisher: Levine Querido
- Publish Date: August 2020
- Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.54 pounds
- Page Count: 368
- Reading Level: Ages 13-17
BookPage® Reviews
Elatsoe
In an alternate Texas where major cities have Fairy Ring Transport Centers and the university offers an invasive monster program, Ellie, a Lipan Apache teenager, just wants to reincarnate prehistoric fossils and teach her ghost dog new tricks. Then her cousin visits her in a dream, says that a man named Abe Allerton murdered him and asks her to protect his family from further harm.
Together with her parents and her friend Jay, Ellie travels to Willowbee to uncover the truth about Abe Allerton, who by all external appearances has led a virtuous life. As Ellie gathers evidence, pieces together clues and retells the myth-tinged adventures of her six-generations-back great-grandmother, whom she calls Six-Great, it becomes clear that the cousin’s murder is part of a larger secret. With Willowbee’s bicentennial just days away, the time is right to vanquish a horror that’s preyed on Native people for far too long.
Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe is a clever mystery narrated by a teen whose voice radiates with wonderful self-confidence. Six-Great’s stories highlight the importance of storytelling in Ellie’s world, and observant readers will delight in the setting’s sociopolitical details: Same-sex marriage is unremarkable, as is Ellie’s asexuality, and the villain is marked in part by his environmentally unfriendly overuse of disposable eating utensils.
Like the self-published comics Ellie regularly devours, Elatsoe presents readers with a strong heroine, a supernatural mystery and a unique and powerful Native American voice.
