Elatsoe
Darcie Little Badger's debut, illustrated by Cherokee artist Rovina Cai, is one of the standout works of the recent Indigenous YA fantasy wave. Elatsoe, called Ellie, is a Lipan Apache teenager living in an alternate United States where vampires and fairy rings and Sasquatch are open knowledge, and Lipan Apache families have been raising the ghosts of dead animals for generations. When her favorite cousin Trevor is found dead in a rural Texas town under suspicious circumstances, Ellie sets out with her ghost-dog Kirby and her best friend Jay to figure out what really killed him, and the answer leads to a wealthy white man whose family fortune is built on a kind of magic the rest of the country has been pretending not to see. Fierce, asexual-positive, and grounded in real Lipan storytelling tradition, the novel was a Time best book and a foundational text for the genre.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Elatsoe
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Seventeen-year-old Lipan Apache teen Elatsoe can wake the ghosts of dead animals, especially her late ghost dog Kirby. When her cousin dies in a small Texas town under suspicious circumstances, she goes there to find out why.
Yes. Darcie Little Badger is Lipan Apache, and Elatsoe draws on her own cultural traditions, including the role of ghost dogs and family ancestral knowledge. The novel is widely cited as a milestone in Indigenous YA fantasy.
Elatsoe is a standalone, but Darcie Little Badger has written companion novels in similar territory, including A Snake Falls to Earth, set in the same broader fictional universe.
Elatsoe was written by Darcie Little Badger, published in 2020 by Cengage Gale.
Elatsoe is 364 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Elatsoe takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
Elatsoe is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.