Brilliant adventure! A high watermark for YA, as comfortable with humour and character relationships as it is with horror and tragedy - And you should go in to this book ready for both. Little Badger creates a believable world, incorporating magic and supernatural creatures from a variety of cultures, though focusing on Lipan Apache, Spanish, English, and White American. This book manages the trick of incorporating these magical elements into a world otherwise like our own with enough detail to make it feel real but without getting bogged down in worldbuilding. Scenes in this book where characters use magic to its full potential (thinking particularly of

Spoiler

draining a vampire of blood using ghost mosquitos, and Ellie's first journey to the world of the dead

) stand together with scenes from Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell as the most memorable depictions of magic I've read.

The story is fast-paced, and kept so by Little Badger's dialogue, which brings out the humour or tension of a situation as needed. Sections which tell the stories of the main character's ancestor, and one in particular, shift the style ably from the more conversational modern segments to a consciously storytelling cadence. Little Badger also peoples her book with a great cast who manage to avoid the frictionless, artificial feel that many YA friendships have, allowing the central themes of the book: family, community, care for our loved ones, care for the environment etc., to emerge through dialogue and negotiation of relationships in regular life and in extreme circumstances. It would also be wrong to mention the cast without saying that this book has some of the best dogs I've read - Utterly adorable.

Speaking of YA, it should be noted that this book skews a little Y-er than most which I have read (for reference, I'm thinking of Leigh Bardugo, Brandon Sanderson's Skyward series, the inimitable Alexa Donne, and others), and, while social issues are in some places interwoven into characters' experiences, at other points they are brought out, inspected, and discussed through the narrative voice of the main character, Ellie (close third person), or in discussions between characters. The discussions are well-voiced, short (usually a page at most), and the issues are worth educating people about, but some readers may be surprised by the inclusion of these more openly-educational segments.

Darcie Little Badger has pulled off an excellent, touching, funny, and at times brutal book which has me searching for where I can get the rest of her stories (and eagerly awaiting any potential sequels). Put that together with the beautiful illustrations provided by Rovina Cai, and this is in strong contention for the best novel I've read this year.