A Snake Falls to Earth
Newbery Honor Award Winner
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She's always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories.
Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he's been cast from home. He's found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake.
Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli's best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven't been in centuries.
And there are some who will kill to keep them apart.
Darcie Little Badger introduced herself to the world with Elatsoe. In A Snake Falls to Earth, she draws on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure to weave another unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. It is not to be missed.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With rich symbolism and gorgeous imagination, Darcie Little Badger has created a vivid new folktale. Texas teen Nina is trying to understand her family’s odd history—and why it involves such incredibly long lifespans. Meanwhile, in the alternate universe known as the Reflecting World, young Oli, a snake person, is trying to figure out why his toad neighbour suddenly seems to be dying. When the girl and the snake’s paths cross on the eve of a Gulf Coast hurricane, their fast friendship is immediately tested by dangers that go beyond weather. With the lightest touch, Little Badger weaves warnings about ecology, cultural loss, climate change, and extinction of both species and languages into this captivating story. She loads A Snake Falls to Earth with everything that great stories have passed down through oral traditions. That makes this novel, like all folktales, a story that becomes more powerful the more that it’s shared.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The second novel by Lipan Apache author Little Badger (Elatsoe) is a smartly intertwined, shifting-perspective story about two characters in worlds that diverged thousands of years ago: Earth-living Nina, who is nine, and Reflecting World–living Oli, 15. With a basis in Apache stories, this sharply told speculative novel details Nina's lineage from her great-great-grandmother Rosita, who has just passed away; her grandmother, who's inherited some of her Reflecting World ancestors' healing powers; and her bookstore-owning father, who distributes books to Reflecting World visitors in human form. Oli, a cottonmouth snake of the Reflecting World, has recently left his mother's home and made friends in wolf sisters Rise and Reign as well as sweet, silent frog Ami. But when Ami grows ill, Oli knows the cure is on Earth—where he meets and helps Nina with her own problems. Fun, imaginative, and deeply immersive, this story will be long in the minds of readers. Ages 12–up.
