Elatsoe (2020), by Darcie Little Badger

Misinterpreting a comment in her introduction, I at first thought that Elatsoe (eh-lat-so-ay) was Darcie Little Badger’s first book, but it turns out that she is quite prolific. More books to add to my “want to read” pile, I guess.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but this wasn’t it.

Elatsoe is full of magic realism that blends seamlessly with the imagination of youth and the stories of the Lipan Apache Nation. This seamlessness was actually a problem for me, as I am almost totally unversed in the Apache culture. At one point, Ellie tells her father, “Dad. We’re Apache. Wendigo is a monster for the northerners” (chapter 7). You can hear the eye-roll. Wendigo, however, is a creature I recognize; “northerners” includes Canadian Indigenous cultures… So while it was a learning experience, but my lack of knowledge rendered me unable to tell where magic realism and imagination bordered on—or overlapped—Indigenous story.

That aside, the combination was, well—magical. We have zombies and vampires and spiritualists and wizards all practicing under the auspices and control of governmental agencies. Ellie herself is intending to go into training as a paranormal investigator: “Her second goal was paleontologist, since she could always double-check her reconstructions with careful use of ghost dinosaurs” (chapter 4). Which brings us to what makes Ellie such an interesting protagonist.

So. Backing up to the opening pages of the book, then. I admit to being a bit flummoxed, but both the initial intrigue and its resolution spurred my interest and anticipation in reading on.

Ellie bought the life-sized plastic skull at a garage sale (the goth neighbors were moving to Salem, and they could not fit an entire Halloween warehouse into their black van). After bringing the purchase home, she dug through her box of craft supplies and glued a pair of googly eyes in its shallow sockets. [So far, so normal…]

“I got you a new friend, Kirby!” Ellie said. “Here, boy! C’mon” Kirby already fetched tennis balls and puppy toys. Sure, anything looked astonishing when it zipped across the room in the mouth of an invisible dog, but a floating googly skull would be extra special. [At this point I thought: “Imaginary friend? How old is our protagonist?”]

Unfortunately, the skull terrified Kirby. He wouldn’t get near it, much less touch it. Maybe it was possessed by a demonic vacuum cleaner. More likely, the skull just smelled weird. …

“Look, a treat!” Ellie put a cheese cube in the skull’s mouth. Although ghosts didn’t eat, Kirby enjoyed sniffing his old favorites: chicken kibble, peanut butter, and cheddar. …

The world Ellie lives in only gets better. Ellie has inherited the natural abilities of “Six-Great,” her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, also Elatsoe, a legendary and “formidable warrior” who had learned how to raise the dead. The dead can also come to Ellie in her dreams, and when her cousin Trevor visits her one night to tell her his death was not accidental, asking her to discover the truth, her father believes her: “We will honor your cousin’s last wishes, ” he said. “Together. As a family.”

Here, Elatsoe veers off the path of expectation. Tradition—in late twentieth-century Western children’s literature at least—is for the parents to be either absent or problematic for the youthful protagonist developing a sense of self. I admit that this has changed in the last couple of decades, but it still seems true that Western youth approach adulthood through a sense of separation; in Elatsoe, maturity is acknowledged as an acceptance of and engagement in the power of family and community. I am sure that children’s literature critics have addressed the coming-of-age trope in Indigenous versus Western cultures; if not, here is fodder.

The investigations of Ellie and her friend Jay—himself part fairy—lead them to crash a charity ball held by a prominent doctor in a nearby community. Not only Ellie and Jay, but Ellie’s mother and aunt, and Jay’s sister, her basketball friends, and her vampire fiancé (and of course Ellie’s grandmother’s ghost mammoth—but you’ll have to read the book) all join in to prevent a paranormal catastrophe. They work together. And succeed. As a family.

Bellamy and the Brute (2017), by Alicia Michaels

21 January 2018

In Bellamy and the Brute, a popular, well-off high school senior is punished for his arrogant and entitled behaviour. Cursed by a disfiguring disease, he retreats into solitude in the upper floor of his family mansion. Enter Bellamy, who is hired as a summer babysitter for his younger siblings. Expressed this way, you can see how Alicia Michaels’s novel is in fact a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, even if the title weren’t so suggestive. But I have to admit that I had to actually think about the underlying teen-angst portion of the tale in order to draw the comparison. The story is so much more interesting than this superficial description leads one to believe, containing as it does murder, ghosts, political corruption, and familial conflict.

FBI Camilla Vasquez is on administrative leave pending a psychological evaluation. Her younger sister, Isabella, had been found dead in a hotel room, but Camilla refuses to believe it was suicide as claimed. It doesn’t surprise us when her brakes mysteriously fail and her car plunges over an embankment. It does surprise us when her spirit looks down on her dead body, takes the hand of her sister, and walks away from the accident. Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me, but I was already so engaged with Camilla as an intelligent protagonist that I was shocked. I had forgotten that I was still reading the prologue. And Camilla, it turns out, is not the protagonist.

Bellamy McGuire is shunned by her schoolmates, teased because of both her scholarly aptitude and her father’s eccentricities. In the two years since his wife’s death Nate McGuire has been seeing ghosts, and the townsfolk consider him deranged, if not actually dangerous. This impacts the income from the family bookstore, so Bellamy takes a summer job as a babysitter for the Baldwin family to help out. Their generosity is curtailed by only one demand: do not go up to the third floor of the house.

Cue mysterious music…

It should be corny, but it isn’t. When Bellamy first sees the ghosts of Camilla and Isabella, she is (not surprisingly) terrified; the plot thickens when she discovers that Tate Baldwin, the disfigured eldest son of the house, can see them too. This revelation (again not surprisingly) draws the two together in a complicated relationship of antagonism mixed with empathy. As Bellamy and Tate begin to work together to unravel the mysterious connections between Tate’s illness and the ghosts’ demand of justice, their investigations lead them deep into a web of corruption ultimately implicates even members of Tate’s family.

Part of what makes this novel so successful is that readers really don’t know the extent of Tate’s family’s involvement in the plot that the two are uncovering. Even when we begin to see what really is going on, we are uncertain how various characters will respond; this unpredictability is an essential component of an effective mystery. As the story progresses, numerous mystery novel tropes can be easily envisioned, and we are not certain which direction Michaels will be taking us. To her credit, her choices do not cater to our narrative expectations.

Continuing this trend of upsetting our predictions, just when we think the threat is gone—the corruption is revealed and the perpetrators headed towards justice—Bellamy and Tate’s lives are knocked sideways by the almost-forgotten high school bullying that landed Tate in his mess in the first place. While the adult world of political corruption is presented as a more serious threat to life, the conflict between Tate and his ex-friend Lincoln has more tragic results. Again, Michaels does not give clues to where she is going to take us; we really believe that bad things can happen to good people. The two separate narratives parallel each other effectively; the explicit message in both is that we are all ultimately responsible for all of our choices, not only our actions. In spite of the rollercoaster ride, karma ultimately plays a strong role in this very griping mystery novel.

Cursed by a Sea God: Odyssey of a Slave, Book II (2013), by Patrick Bowman

This review was first published in Resource Links Magazine, “Canada’s national journal devoted to the review and evaluation of Canadian English and French resources for children and young adults.” It appears in volume 18.4.

Cursed by the Sea God

I have been waiting for the next installment of Patrick Bowman’s Odyssey of a Slave ever since I finished the first book, Torn from Troy (2011). Cursed by a Sea God did not in any way disappoint. Torn from Troy is a retelling of Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus begins to recount the ten years since his departure from Troy after its conquest: he tells of their encounters with the Cicones, the Lotus-eaters, and the Cyclops. In Cursed by the Sea God, the Trojan protagonist, Alexias, commonly known as Alexi, continues his journey as a slave on Odysseus’s boat, the Pelagios. After their dramatic escape from the Cyclops at the end of Torn from Troy, the Greek soldiers and sailors, and their Trojan slaves, find themselves in a land where the king has harnessed the winds—he thinks… but the winds have become powerful, and his erstwhile reasonable punishments have been resulting in his peoples’ deaths. Alexi’s outspoken nature again serves him well; with his help, Odysseus reveals the truth to the King, who grants them the powers of the wind to sail to their home in Ithaca. Bowman’s subtle humour comes into play, when King Aeolus insists that instead of “Your Majesty,” they call him “Your Inclemency.” When the sailors inadvertently release the winds, Alexi is blamed, and it takes all his wit and verbal abilities—as well as most of the novel—to regain Odysseus’s trust.

The story from Homer that readers will most likely recognize is that of Circe, who turns the crew into pigs. Alexi, a pig himself, has not part in this rescue, but learns from Odysseus’s behaviour that all is not black and white. While Circe is a wicked enchantress, she is also the source of information that helps Odysseus and his crew to survive on their journey, which includes a decent into—and return from—Hades. Through it all, we are shown the complex mixture of compassion and ruthlessness that Alexi recognizes—and resents—in Odysseus: he knows that Odysseus treats him well, but knows also that he is still a slave, and a pawn in Odysseus’s clever manipulations of his crew. We are shown the depths of Alexi’s internal turmoil, and care greatly for his success and happiness. Once again, Bowman has created for young readers a faithful representation of Homer’s plot, presented in a narrative that is fantastical, fast-paced, and sure to captivate young readers.

The Proof That Ghosts Exist (2008), by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman

22 June 2013

This is a delightful book that makes me want to run out and read other books Perry Nodelman has written… as I know him mainly as an academic.  (Carol Matas’s books I have read quite a few of…) Matas and Nodelman’s characters are believably drawn, and their plot fairly cohesive.  There are minor issues, such as the grandfather ghost, who should have died in 1978, not knowing “pastrami,” but using the term “salted beef.”  Even for a British character, that seemed strange… and his “hippy” hair and language as well… The resolution is a little too tidy and trite, as well… the suspense is not developed sufficiently and the answers the children need come too readily to hand.  This makes it seem like a book you might not want to read, but it really is far from that.  I looked forward anxiously to the launch of the second in the Ghosthunters series, as the larger mystery is only partially solved by the children’s discoveries in this book.  Matas and Nodelman have an engaging style, one example of which is having both children be narrators, often remarking upon the same incident or memory, or using a similar reference, but in diametrically opposed ways: as Adam and Molly are chalk-and-cheese siblings, this technique works marvellously.

Ghosthunters #2, The Curse of the Evening Eye, came out in 2009; Ghost hunters #3, The Hunt for the Haunted Elephant, in 2010.