Darcie Little Badger extends the exquisite world of ‘Elatsoe’ to the 1970s.

On this week’s Fully Booked podcast, Darcie Little Badger discusses Sheine Lende (Levine Querido, April 16), a prequel to her widely acclaimed YA debut, Elatsoe.

Elatsoe is the story of Ellie, a modern-day Lipan Apache teen with supernatural giftswho attempts to solve her cousin’s murder. Sheine Lende takes readers two generations back, to when Ellie’s grandmother, Shane, was a teenager in the 1970s. She and her mother, Lorenza, are a Texas-based volunteer search-and-rescue team who aim to reunite families in need—with the help of their loyal ghost dogs.

Little Badger is an American novelist, short story writer, and Earth scientist whose second novel, A Snake Falls to Earth, received a Nebula Award, Ignyte Award, a Newbery Honor, and a spot on the National Book Awards longlist for young people’s literature. She is a member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas and holds a Ph.D. in oceanography.

Here’s a bit from our starred review of Sheine Lende: “Familiar both with tracking to survive in the wilderness and counting change to survive under capitalism, Shane possesses the resourcefulness of an irresistible protagonist. Her practicality also provides the perfect foil for her extraordinary ability—inherited from her four-great-grandmother—to summon dead creatures, adding texture to her supernatural world. What starts out as Lorenza’s quest to locate two missing children becomes Shane’s journey through Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, and the ghostly land Below to find her mother after she disappears. While faeries and vampires inhabit Shane’s surroundings, the heart of her story is her family’s endurance despite various tragedies, including climate devastation and rich settlers’ betrayal and theft. Frequent flashbacks and late-breaking perspective changes add narrative complexity, alongside rich depictions of cultural identity, generational trauma, and community care.…A classic fantasy adventure and a balm for any soul weary of oppression.”

Little Badger tells us whether she always planned to expand Elatsoe; the special powers inherent in Shane and Ellie’s matriline (for example, the ability to call the souls of animals from the ghostly land ); journeying to the groovy 1970s in fiction, and the significant price of long-distance phone calls; how Sheine Lende is both the story of Shane and the story of her family; how when something big happens to one member of a close-knit family, the whole family experiences it; how magic works in Elatsoe and Sheine Lende; how a foreign body or agent introduced to a new environment without care can disrupt the natural balance; transportation, magical and traditional; and the parallel story told in the illustrations by Rovina Cai.

Then editors Mahnaz Dar, Eric Liebetrau, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for the week.

EDITORS’ PICKS:

Ultraviolet by Aida Salazar (Scholastic)

The Believer: A Year in the Fly-Fishing Life by David Coggins (Scribner)

James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Fixing America by William M. Taggart IV

Being Human. Human Being. by Paul Black

The Twist-a-Roo by Kathleen Doherty, illus. by Kristyna Litten

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.