Elatsoe
Elatsoe is the November pic for my Banned Books reading group. It’s the story of Ellie, a Lipan Apache girl living in an America much like ours but with magic, whose summer is interrupted by the sudden death of an older cousin. Ellie happens to be a talented necromancer in a line of necromancers, and her cousin sends a message from beyond the grave: his death was not an accident, he was murdered, and the killer is the wealthy and influential doctor in Willowbee, Texas.
Ellie goes with her father and mother to Willowbee to support her cousin’s widow and their baby in this time of grief, but also to unravel a mystery with the help of her best friend Jay and her spectral dog Kirby (perks to being a necromancer).
There are lots of individual bits to like. All of the characters, starting with Ellie, are wonderfully well drawn and rounded, given plenty of space to breathe and be themselves. The stories of Ellie’s namesake, her Six-Great Grandmother Elatsoe, and her use of ghost mammoths against various 18th century enemies of the Apache, are a high point. Magic is nicely lumpy. Along with Ellie’s necromancy, people with fairy blood (like her best friend Jay) can travel from point to point by circles of mushrooms, and vampires are also unremarkable, showing up as both allies and enemies. While everyone agrees magic is real, magical evidence is not admissible in a court of law, since it warps causality. The town itself is classic horror-movie creepy, a lush New England patch of green in the Texas desert. The residents react with suspicion to Ellie’s inquiries. Meanwhile, her cousin’s vengeful ghost is pushing from beyond the grave. Many people and spirits are willing to commit more crimes to cover up this murder.
On the downside, the plot lurches between sedate and sprint, the treatment of vampirism and fairy magic doesn’t have a smidgen of the originality and character that Ellie’s ghost magic does, and the investigation plot has a kind of blundering reminiscent of an average RPG session, driven more by page count than Ellie’s actions. This definitely isn’t my kind of fiction, but it was fun enough.
This book was banned in 2023 by the Florida Clay County School District, which is outside Jacksonville. Though in their defense (and you do not ‘have to give it to’ censorious Floridians), it appears that the ban was removing this book from middle school libraries while keeping it in high school libraries, so who knows. Ellie is asexual, there’s enough magic to make fundies fearful, and perhaps above all else, the novel takes an indigenous view on the basic goodness of the colonization of the Americas.