I think this is a really good book. I made three points about it because they were the first to come to mind, but it's genuinely a great read - it reads a bit younger than most YA I've read recently, so it might be appropriate for middle grade readers as well. I know my review is certainly not the best structured but those are the three things I thought about when reading, so here they are.

The Parents and Family History:

One of the most important things about Elatsoe as a story are family and oral history. Ellie is Lipan Apache and has lived with stories of her six-great-grandmother - a powerful ghost summoner and warrior. This ancestry and family history is intrinsic to who she is.

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The contrast between her family's secrets, kept a secret for safekeeping and to sustain their historically persecuted culture, and the Allertons' secret, which is preserved only to maintain profit and exclusivity, really exemplify the problems with colonialist extraction.

I appreciated that she wasn't yet another kid heading to danger without parental supervision but had a mother and father who trusted her gift and guided her on how to use it safely. It's literally so rare to see any parental figure in middle grade and YA that actually helps nurture their child.

Asexuality:

While asexuality is not in the center of the story, it's there. It is very unobtrusive, shown in Ellie's assuredness that she's not going to marry, or have children, in the absence of any romantic plotlines - both main or side, and in the way people don't question it but still acknowledge it.

Ellie is on the asexual spectrum, presumably aroace. Some have criticized the author for not using the label aromantic along with asexual, but I'd disagree - not every ace person uses the split attraction model (defining sexual and romantic attraction on two separate axes). I don't think we should expect that from books either. The most beautiful thing about the story is that Ellie is just allowed to live as herself, without the need for her queer identity to be the subject of the story in any way, but rather as a fact of her life.

Random Thoughts About Vampires:

This story features vampires, which in this world are the bearers of a vampiric curse, which was brought over to with the Western European colonialists. I loved how the narrative used vampires and vampiric imagery - the scene where

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Violet banishes a vampire by uninviting him from her ancestral land -

was one of the most powerful uses of vampires I've ever seen in any piece of media. Also I find that it ties very neatly into the

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leech imagery connected to the Allertons. It was very clever - both in communicating their ancient healing tradition and in foreshadowing its nature.

While I loved it, I find it a but funny vampires aren't actually Western European in origin but Eastern European. Honestly, most Eastern Europeans don't even know we have vampire myths in the first place because the Western version is just so prevalent in pop culture, so it's not a big deal. I also known for a fact that the colonizers did bring their version of our myth over to the Americas. I still think the author uses vampires brilliantly and wanted to share this as a fun fact more than anything.