It's very moving to me to see a whole family pulling together as a dramatic unit, and I loved the place parents and grand-parents occupy in the narrative, present as storytellers and stories both.
Ellie's a great character, kind and keen, and her relationships with friends and parents are a pleasure to dwell in. This was deeply enjoyable from start to finish, with moments of shockingly clear insight and sharp knife-twists of plot. Ellie and her parents set out to the remote town of Willowbee to support Trevor's wife and infant child through the loss - as well as solve the mystery of his death, and bring his killer to justice. One night something spooks her spectral spaniel badly enough to seem a death omen, and soon afterwards she learns that her cousin Trevor's been killed - and that his murder's been made to seem an accident. While her predecessors trained phantom woolly mammoths to be their companions, Ellie's content with Kirby, the springer spaniel of her childhood. There are strict rules against bringing back the souls of dead humans, who are certain to return as monstrous simulacra of their former selves, but Ellie's part of a long ancestral line who've summoned and trained the ghosts of animals, be they recently deceased or long-fossilized. Dead dogs make cheerful ghost companions while widows mourn young husbands vampires propose marriage to fairy princesses while miracle-working doctors keep sinister secrets.Įlatsoe - who goes by Ellie - is a 17-year-old Lipan Apache girl, raised with her family's secret knowledge of ghost-calling. Set in a version of our contemporary world where everyone knows ghosts, fairies, and vampires are real, Elatsoe, like its namesake protagonist, walks a zig-zagging line between humor and horror, braiding them into each other.
There's a spooky warmth to Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger's debut novel.
0 kommentar(er)
