Darcie Little Badger Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Darcie Little Badger is a fantasy author and geoscientist. She also writes genres like fiction, horror, and science fiction. As a Lipan Apache, she creates her stories with apache themes and characters.

She holds a Ph.D. in oceanography, and her debut, Elatsoe novels, was featured in Time Magazine as among the 100 best fantasy books. The novel also won the Locus award for being the Best First Novel. Badger’s second novel, A Snake Falls to Earth, got the Newbery award and appeared on the national Book Awards list.

Elatsoe
Elatsoe is a seventeen-year-old teenager with supernatural gifts looking for ways of solving her cousin’s murder case before the clock stops ticking. Apart from owning a ghost dog named Kirby, Ellie is just like any normal book lover and ice cream-eating teenager. She has non-native friends: Jay, a white, and Lenore, her cousin Trevor’s Latinx wife.

She lives in a world with vampires and fae folks and can raise the dead. The skill has been passed through generations of Lipan Apache. However, she isn’t allowed to raise dead persons since they can come back in monster forms to harm the living. She only raises dead animals.

Ellie inherited the talents of Six-Great-Grandmother, her powerful Lipan Apache forebear, and is planning to skip college to be a paranormal investigator. She inherited a great power to summon ghosts from the underworld. It’s the kind of power that can be misused if held by someone without compassion and morals. After Trevor dies in what is said to be an accident, His ghost asks her to keep his wife and child safe. The ghost also reveals to her that he was killed and needs help finding the killer.

The facts of his car accident’ don’t add up, and Ellie knows that this is foul play. She travels to Willowbee, Texas, searching for the truth, and on the way, she meets vampires’ strange histories and mysterious doctors. Ellie has also to face her strengths and weaknesses in the mission to bring Trevor’s killer to justice. In the theme of Justice, the author shows how it’s difficult to get justice, especially if one is a minority.

Ellie calls upon her lineage to free her ancestral land for an ancient curse. Even after realizing that some of her relatives have been accomplices in historical wrongdoings, she has to save her family and community from dangerous forces and bring back balance to the world.

Elatsoe is a fast-paced story set in a contemporary world like the one we live in. It’s a creative fusion of Indigenous cultural influence and supernatural fantasy. The novel blends cyberstalking and Lipan Apache stories. It’s a great introduction to a fantasy series and remains relevant to native history even though it imaginatively looks at the future.

Little Badger has woven stories within stories in this multilayered and magical mystery. The plot and the setting are compelling, and the reflections on the counter-narratives are woven alongside subplots containing fairy rings and vampires. As Ellie digs deeper to know what happened to her cousin, she starts to understand herself and her history better. Most parts of Ellie’s past and adventures are connected to her family history and ancestry story.

The illustrations are lovely, and the writing is simple and easy to understand. It’s a creative and exciting story that blends paranormal, mystery, and noir.

A Snake Falls to Earth
The novel tells the story of Nina and Oli, where Oli is an animal person, a Cottonmouth snake shapeshifter living in the worlds of spirits and monsters. He was thrown out of the nest because it’s a snake tradition after he came of age and had to survive independently. Nina is a Lipan girl living in the human world, and all she wants is to keep her grandmother safe. She believes in the old stories and is ready to learn more about them.

Nina tries to understand her grandmother, Rosita, using a translating app as the story opens up. When Rosita narrates a story in Apache, the app doesn’t recognize the language, but the recording leaves Nina with some fragments she can use to bring the story together. Her effort to understand her grandmother and the old world stories drives her in the course of the novel.

The novel establishes one of the modern obstacles to oral storytelling tradition. Due to the continued oppression and persecution, many indigenous languages have lost their meaning. The Indigenous folklore and other forms of the story are at risk of being lost. For how long will the languages remain relevant if they can’t be understood first?

After being cast out of his home, Oli doesn’t know whether his kind exists until a tragic incident happens, and they’re brought together by fate. Little Badger discusses their struggles while living in their worlds and how they cross paths.

Nina is so much determined to unveil the remains of the spirit world. On the other hand, Oli uses his newly found independence after being thrown out of his nest, which leads him to an adventure to the human world. When environmental struggles bring them together, they realize interconnected their worlds.
To add to Nina’s struggle, a hurricane approaches her old family home, and she suspects that it’s connected to the spirit world. While leaving home, Oli comes across a monster, strangers, and new land and finds his independence both frightening and exciting.

Badger has an aptitude for incredible storytelling. The chapters alternate between Nina and Oli’s perspectives, and it gives the reader insight into the characters and their worlds. The author’s writing is whimsical, hopeful, and distinct, as each sentence carries the story forward with ease while keeping the reader engaged and craving for more.

As Nina uses technology to understand the old stories, Little Badger utilizes smart analogies. There are themes of colonization, indigenous identity, and environmental issues. The novel also rediscovers the beauty, sanctity, and power nature brings forth. The wave effect of earth’s catastrophes on the spirit world and spirit’s effect on Earth serves as a reminder of the current human world. Increased pollution, ignorance, and destruction of the environment have brought so much harm. For humankind to survive and the planet’s beauty, people, should protect the earth since they’re all connected.

For readers looking for a novel that is honest and hopeful about the state of the world, A Snake Falls to Earth is perfect for you.