A Snake Falls to Earth
Darcie Little Badger
A Snake Falls to Earth caught my interest by beginning with a linguistic mystery. Nina Aroyo is one of the two principle protagonists of A Snake Falls to Earth. Her great^n-grandmother Rosita ("great^n" means I'm not exactly sure how many "greats" belong there) tells Nina a story told her by her (Rosita's) mother. Although Rosita and Nina are Lipan Apache, they don't share a common language. Rosita speaks Spanish and Nina English. Therefore Nina uses a translation app on her phone to understand the story. Well, most of the story shows up as gibberish on the app. It turns out that Rosita memorized the sound of the story, as told her in Lipan Apache, which the translation app doesn't understand. With the help of her mother Alicia, who happens to be a translator and linguist, Nina constructs a partial key based on Lipan and Jicarilla Apache and also Navajo, which (I did not know this) is a related language. Rosita's story is a story from Apache folklore.
Apache folklore as here depicted is peopled by animal spirits, who have "true forms", which are animals, and "false forms", which resemble humans. The second protagonist, Oli, is one of these: he's a cottonmouth snake. The spirits live in a world that is mostly separate from Earth but is linked to it. After some initial coming-of-age type adventures, Oli settles comfortably in the spirit world, where he makes friends of some of the other animals. One of his friends falls ill, and the healer tells him the problem is on Earth. Oli finds a way to travel to Earth, where he and Nina help each other out.
I enjoyed this introduction to Apache folklore, about which I knew almost nothing. (And therefore I can say nothing about how accurate a representation of that folklore it is.) It was also an entertaining story, probably well targeted for Middle Grades.