A Snake Falls to Earth

A Snake Falls to Earth

Mel 3.12.21

Details:

  • author: Darcie Little Badger
  • full title: A Snake Falls to Earth
  • narrators: Shaun Taylor-Corbett and Kinsale Hueston
  • genre: fantasy, YA, general fiction
  • topics: #ancientstories #worldofspirits #environment
  • publisher: Recorded Books
  • publish date: 23.11.2021
  • timing: 10:36:00

My Rating of the Audiobook:

  • content: 💙💙💙.5
  • narration: 💙💙💙💙
 
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature





Excerpt from the Book:

It started with a beat. Clack, clack, clack. Like two drumsticks tapping against each other before the beginning of a rock song. However, the song never began. Just clack, clack, clack. I couldn't pinpoint where the sound originated from. It seemed to echo from the trees, bombarding me from every direction. Confused, I stopped walking.
The Sound stopped, too.
When had the forest become so quiet? Even the white noise of bird chirps was gone. Earlier, I'd felt avoided. Now, I felt alone.
Well. Almost alone. The drumstick tapper clearly sensed me, because the moment I resumed walking, the clacking started again. What irony. Only minutes later, I'd been desperate for company, but now I was so afraid to meet the beat maker, I started to run.

My Thoughts:

A Snake Falls to Earth is an audiobook that is tough for me to review. In its essence, this is a very beautiful story. Also quite odd. 

It’s a story of two very different worlds. On one side, we have this cottonmouth kid Oli and his animal friends. They can all change into their false forms—humanlike forms. And on the other side, there’s a Lipan Apache girl, Nina. She’s a teen, and she is fascinated by her family’s old stories and writes them down so that they wouldn’t be forgotten. She is pretty tech-savvy and uses quite some technology. So here we have a clash of two worlds: a world of spirits where Oli tries to save his friend from extinction and our modern world of technology with Nina. Two very different worlds, but soon their stories connect.

The first half of the book is quite slow-paced. In the second half, the pacing is a bit faster. So, I needed quite some time to get into the story.

I’m not sure, but I would probably enjoy this one if I read it myself. There are two narrators, male for Oli and female for Nina, and I like both. In the future, I will read some of the author’s other works. Before I saw this, I was especially interested in Elatsoe.

This story would be best for (maybe younger) teens or adults interested in ancient stories about spirits and like some nice fable along the way. I guess not all teens would be interested in this kind of story because it needs quite a distinctive reader.

About the Author:

Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache writer with a PhD in oceanography. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Elatsoe, was featured in Time Magazine as one of the best 100 fantasy novels of all time. Darcie's short fiction, nonfiction and comics have appeared in multiple places, including Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1, Nightmare Magazine, Strange Horizons, and The Dark.

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