Elatsoe

Overview

Darcie Little Badger's Elatsoe unfolds in a version of the United States reshaped by the magic and lore of the many peoples who live there, Indigenous and otherwise. Alongside familiar teenage routines like homework and friendship, this America holds fungal portals, conjured lights, and other forces that operate quietly alongside ordinary life.

Its narrator, a Lipan Apache teenager named Elatsoe, carries an inherited ability to summon the spirits of dead animals, a practice passed down through her family's history. When her cousin is killed in the outwardly tidy town of Willowbee, she sets aside deference to adult authority and begins her own investigation.

What she finds beneath the town's welcoming surface is far uglier than a single crime, and dismantling it requires every resource she has: her ghost-raising skill, her network of friends, and a stubborn refusal to look away.

A Mystery Rooted in Inheritance and Place

Little Badger builds her novel around the idea that inherited knowledge is a form of power, and that a community's polished exterior can conceal what it would rather not answer for. Elatsoe's magic is presented not as a generic fantasy device but as something specific to her family and culture, passed down rather than discovered, which grounds the book's supernatural elements in questions of lineage and belonging.

The novel also sits within a broader conversation about who gets to tell Indigenous stories and how. By centering a Lipan Apache protagonist whose identity is treated as ordinary rather than exceptional, and by folding a murder investigation into a setting where the uncanny is simply part of how the world works, the book has been discussed as an example of contemporary Indigenous speculative fiction that resists framing Native characters primarily through trauma or history.

Why Elatsoe Has Been Challenged

A recurring flashpoint is Elatsoe's own identity: she is depicted as aromantic and asexual and has a girlfriend, and some challengers have objected to this representation appearing in a book aimed at younger readers, treating the inclusion of a queer protagonist as content requiring restriction rather than as incidental characterization. The book's supernatural core, the raising of the dead through inherited ritual, has separately drawn scrutiny from those who view depictions of ghost-summoning and magic as promoting occult practice, even though the story presents it as an ordinary family tradition rather than something sinister. The murder at the plot's center and the violence Elatsoe uncovers while investigating it have also been cited as mature content unsuitable for the shelves where the book is sometimes placed. Taken together, these objections reflect discomfort with LGBTQ representation and supernatural themes more than with any single scene, and they have led to the book being formally challenged in 1 state and 1 school district tracked in this catalog.