This book will stay with me for quite a while. There is a deep examination of grief and death that is 100% relevant and interwoven with the plot. Elatsoe has a good amount of suspense and I worried a lot for the characters. I could not put it down after the 65% mark. There were a few times when I wanted to yell "Stop Kids! You're making a bad decision!" but even though they made their own choices they came out alright in the end. The social commentary is both upfront and nuanced. I liked the asexual representation, and that it is clear while she plans on not having children Ellie is invested in her community and future generations. 
It is on the younger side of Young Adult, and some of that I think comes from the writing on a sentence level. Now I listened to the audiobook, so I cannot reexamine the sentences or give examples, but I think that most of them follow a similar pattern. This could make for easier reading, or make the narrator feel flat. One thing that irked me was when an action sequence was interrupted for a story about Six Great (Ellie's sixth Great-Grandmother). It pulled me out of the book and made me wonder about the author's choices and not Ellie's choices. I know that in the situation Ellie was facing, I might briefly recall an image from the Six Great story, but I definitely would not think through the whole story until everyone was safe. 
I read this for Book Riot's 2023 challenge #17: Read a YA book by an Indigenous author. I'm not sure if this is a book that I'll revisit, but I am very glad that I read it.