A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger (review)

When Nina’s great-great-grandmother dies, she passes on a story that the translator app on Nina’s phone can’t interpret. Since Nina has grown up compiling dictionaries of indigenous languages, she has the skill to piece the tale together, and she realizes it’s about the animal people. Concurrently, in the Reflecting World, Oli is a cottonmouth person on his own for the first time, swept up in the antics of an alligator woman, a bounty hunter bear, and two mischievous yet friendly coyote sisters. Because the animal people are connected to their species on Earth, when Oli’s toad friend Ami gets sick, it indicates the extinction of his Earth species, so Oli travels to Earth to seek help, finding understanding in Nina and her family. As in the case with Little Badger’s debut Elatsoe (BCCB 9/20), main character Nina is, like the author herself, Lipan Apache. The climate change happening in Texas in the novel, with its hurricanes, flash floods, and tornadoes, will be a close subject to those who have recently experienced drastic temperature change and flooding in their own lives; Little Badger maintains an effective balance between the magic of the animal people’s holding a tornado at bay and the futility of undoing years of damage to the planet. The take on technology is interesting and modern, with Nina attempting to win beaucoup bucks from a video-based app with a staged bear attack and using her translator app to crack a dying language. The baddie is a little predictable, but it’s made up for by a more realistic ending that exhorts people with the millions to influence climate change and turn the tide.