A review by abbynlewis
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

5.0

Elatsoe is a magical realism YA novel where the world we are used to exits in tandem with many other creatures such as vampires and werewolves. The world of Elatsoe reminds me of the world in the Spiderwick chronicles (the book, obvi, not the deplorable movie). Elatsoe, who goes by Ellie, is a bright young woman whose cousin has just been murdered. Everyone is calling it an accident, a car wreck, but Ellie knows better. She has dreams about the dead, and her cousin visits her while she’s asleep shortly after he dies. Ellie, with the help of her ghost dog Kirby, as well as her wonderfully present and supportive parents and her hometown friends, begins to unravel the mystery of her cousin’s death. But communing with the dead is a serious feat, and if done wrong, things can quickly get out of hand. Is Ellie strong enough to handle the darkness around her family’s history?

I adored this book from start to finish. The opening chapter does drop you in the middle of the story, and it took a few pages for me to get my footing, but after the third chapter, I was hooked. Ellie’s parents are present from the start of the novel, which is an outlier in many YA novels, so it was so much fun to have Ellie not only actively communicating with her parents but to have her parents be a part of the investigation and look out for her as the trail of leads becomes more and more dangerous.

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