Mary: Weeeeelcome to YA Book Club, where we talk about a new YA book approximately once per month. This time around, Todd is joining us to discuss Darcie Little Badger’s A Snake Falls to Earth. You might remember that Emily and I read Elatsoe last year and loved it. We had (perhaps unrealistic) high hopes for A Snake Falls to Earth, so it shot to the top of our to-read list when it came out. Todd also loved Elatsoe, and I happen to be married to him and think he’s smart, so he’s here, too! Hello, Todd!
Todd: Hi!
Mary: A Snake Falls to Earth is the story of Oli, a little snake boy in the world of animal people, and Nina, a young girl trying to unwrap the mysteries of her family’s ancestral homeland and her grandmother’s mysterious illness. Nina loves storytelling, and uses an app to keep a personal diary of cool stories she’s heard. Oli eventually must travel to Earth to help his friend, and Nina in the process.
I’ll say it up front: this book was not at all what I expected and was very difficult for me to get into. I’m a big believer in formatting changing my reading experience because I have trouble paying attention to different formats at various times. Sometimes, an ebook is just going to be easier for me because I can flip through it more quickly. Other times, I need an audiobook so I can do other things while I enjoy my novel. Some texts just require savoring a hardback. For A Snake Falls to Earth, I ended up doing ALL THREE at some point because I had so much trouble staying engaged. There was just nothing happening, and I didn’t have any indication of where the story was going or why.
Emily: And just for a frame of reference, I’ll go ahead and say I did the audiobook. And I listened to it on 2x because I very quickly got bored and wanted to get through this book ASAP. This is such a terrible way to start this blog post, but I guess we gotta get that out there right at the beginning so that you’re not sad when you find out Mary and I didn’t like this book. Because I know a lot of people are loving it. Including Todd.
Mary: I told Todd at one point that this felt like a book for children written for the patience levels of an adult. While Elatsoe also felt like its characters were much younger than they were, it didn’t annoy me like it did in A Snake Falls to Earth. I had no concept of what the stakes were, and at no point did I feel like the characters were in danger or under any sort of threat. Is the Nightmare King scary? IDK. Not really. Does it seem like a huge tragedy for a frog who has never spoken or offered any indication that they have an inner life to die? Eh. This makes me sound heartless, but I truly had a hard time figuring out why I should care.
Emily: No, Mary, I totally agree. And when we originally discussed Elatsoe, one of our comments about it is that it did feel really young. Like if it weren’t for the subject matter, I would categorize Elatsoe as a middle-grade novel rather than a YA novel. This book… felt like a kid’s book.
Todd: I will say, I really enjoyed it! Part of this, I think, is because I have been thinking a lot about the apocalypse in my own writing recently and the larger effects of climate change on humans as well as our non-human companions on Earth. For that reason, the stakes felt pretty big! Because the death of Oli’s friend, Ami, signals not just that Ami is dying but that his entire species is dying out. Similarly, I felt a personal connection to Nina’s story because of my own family issues with disease and sickness. So while I might have been predisposed to like this novel, I also really feel like there is something here for people who don’t necessarily have a personal connection to the material.
I will say that the book does start pretty slow. However, it was a breeze for me to read and because of the strength of Elatsoe, I just convinced myself that the struggle of the beginning of the novel would ultimately be worth it. Your own mileage, obviously, may vary!
Mary: That’s completely fair. This very much feels like one of those novels that I didn’t personally enjoy but I could see others enjoying. It took over half the novel for Oli and Nina to meet, and for most of the book their stories just unraveled simultaneously. I wish I had had more hope that things would sync up, especially since I also loved Elatsoe, but I just couldn’t. This also has to do, I’m sure, with me feeling pretty nihilistic about climate change. We’re already on the train to hell, and the right people just don’t seem to care.
Talking about apocalypses and end-times stuff, do you feel like that’s what’s going on here? Sure, Ami’s people might be dying out, but that’s happened to so many species. Is there something bigger at play here?
Obviously, there are also more frequent hurricanes and bad weather patterns in Texas, where Nina lives.
Emily: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely what’s going on here.
Climate change, y’all.
Todd: I think this is where my own bias plays into my reading of the novel. I feel like there is a trend in a lot of books these days to just mention how storms are more frequent/violent than they used to be, or to talk about how “unseasonably hot” it is outside. This strikes me as an author’s way to talk about climate change without completely derailing their story to stop and talk about it. For me, the crux of this novel is about stories (another hobbyhorse of mine) and how the stories we tell influence the world around us. Oli and the coyote-twins can literally shape the world! But for most people, their existence would be chalked up to “mere” stories or folklore.
Similarly, Nina’s plot for most of the novel, especially at the beginning, involves her trying to understand this story that her great-great-great(?)-grandmother tried to convey to her before she died. The novel, like Elatsoe, does a great job weaving magic into the everyday—like the fact that Nina’s family on her father’s side seems to live longer than is humanly possible—in a way that feels matter-of-fact while also seeming innately tied to the characters’ history as indigenous Americans. I really love the way that Little Badger does this, and I think I chalked up a lot of the more meandering or episodic aspects of the novel as Little Badger’s attempt to decolonize literature and return to an earlier kind of storytelling. Now, that does not mean that those attempts are successful, necessarily, but I appreciate what Little Badger is trying to do.
Here’s a question: did y’all like the characters? You’ve talked a little about how Nina reads as much younger than she is, which is weird, but I have to say I absolutely loved most of the characters we meet in the animal world. The coyote-twins are great, as is the mockingbird, and even Oli is a very relatable character, just trying to make it in the world.
Emily: I had a really hard time connecting to the animal characters, because they felt so childish to me. Like maybe that’s why this read so much like a children’s book to me because we were following animals for so much of it. I have also realized that I tend to feel a little more connected to stories that are connected to the real world. So straight away, I was wanting to connect to Nina’s story more. But it was just so slow. I just wanted the two worlds to meet because I knew if the animals were interacting with Nina/our world, it would be more interesting for me. But that just… didn’t happen. For the longest time. As Mary already said.
Mary: And it did seem like the animal world was connected to the real world, but that wasn’t apparent at all for SO LONG.
I definitely think the concepts the characters are playing with are interesting, but I’m not sure I felt like I actually knew anything about the characters themselves. I mentioned earlier how it seemed like the book was written for younger audiences, and that’s kind of related to this point. I never felt like I knew what Nina wanted other than to tell stories (like, what does that look like in the future? What are her motivations for it now?), and it seems like she lives a pretty isolated life.
I did enjoy the animal characters, but most of them seemed kind of one-dimensional. Oh, coyote people? They’re tricksy! Mockingbird people? They’ll lie to you! I was genuinely interested in the mockingbird, but then that character just sort of…dropped off? IDK. I’ll also say that me listening to most of the book on audiobook did not help the situation. We all know I’m notoriously picky about audiobooks and the voices one of the narrators did for the animal people was not it. He used an extremely dopey voice for all the bears and an obnoxious whine for the coyotes. I honestly couldn’t handle it.
Emily: Completely agree. This also probably fed into my feeling that the animal characters were super childish. They were read like child characters in the audiobook.
Mary: I almost think I might have enjoyed the book better if the stories had stayed separate but influenced each other, if that makes sense. I think that Nina meeting the animal people and making a video that they intended to go viral (sigh) was the point of no return for me.
Emily: I really, really hated that whole storyline. Like, right away, I was like, “Okay, this is a stupid idea.”
Only certain people can be internet stars, and it’s not Nina.
Mary: Look, this is not how content creation works. Emily and I both write about content for work, albeit in different fields, and I’m pretty sure both of us can attest to just how wrong this understanding of viral videos is! No one sits down to make a viral video, or if they do, it doesn’t become popular. Does Nina really think she’s going to go from never publishing a video to millions of views literally with one video? That just doesn’t happen unless there’s something else going on. Plus, okay, there’s just this guy that watches other videos and then makes them famous? I know a lot of streamers make bank doing reaction videos, but this guy seemed like he was trying to host a TV show or something, and he didn’t have a streamer vibe at all. It felt like…ridiculously outdated in a sense, and it completely ripped me out of the world of the book. Am I being cynical?
Todd: I’ll be honest, the viral video stuff is dumb. The Storyteller app feels like something that the author understands but which is never entirely spelled out for readers. But once again, I sort of just accepted it. In a world where people live to be 150 and animal people are real, I let this wash over me. I know there are different kinds of suspension of disbelief, and maybe the viral video is too much for some readers, but I wasn’t too bothered by it, ultimately. It also helps that the whole scheme ends up failing spectacularly (at least until a shapeshifting mockingbird saves the day…for rEaSoNs).
Emily: Yeah but the fact that they had this dumb idea and it didn’t work, again, made the whole thing feel childish. Like, yes, children would have an idea like this and would think it would work because children don’t know how the world works. Although to be fair I think even children know how viral videos work better than this.
Todd: At the end of the day, I appreciated the world that Little Badger constructed, and I was happy to spend a little more time in it. It really felt like anything was possible, and by the end of the novel a dying species has been saved, a tornado has been lassoed, and things really do seem like they will be okay for all of our main characters. A story like that is something that we could all use sometimes.
Emily: This has been really interesting, because I don’t think it’s that often that we have a conversation about a book we disagree this strongly about. Like we said before, all three of us really loved Elatsoe and were super excited for this one. But I think it’s clear it really worked for Todd and it was not working for us. Like. At all.
Like, I’m really wondering if I read the same book as everyone else. Because this book has really high ratings on Goodreads, and I’m having trouble—even after Todd’s explanation about why he liked it—understanding how anyone could like this book. And I feel bad about saying that because I wanted to like this book so badly.
With that in mind, should we break people’s hearts and rate this?
Mary: Sadly, yes. I give this book 2 stars because I just DID NOT like it at all. I HATE that I gave it such a low rating, and I’ll definitely pick up Little Badger’s next book, but A Snake Falls to Earth just wasn’t doing it for me.
Emily: 1 star. That one star is a star of good faith because I loved Elatsoe so much and I want to love this author. But like… This book was trash.
Todd: Look, I’ll just say it: 5 stars! It started slow for me, but I ultimately loved this book, and it made me even more excited for Little Badger’s next adventure.
Emily: Next time on YA Book Club, we’ll be discussing another REPEAT AUTHOR. Last year, Mary and I loved Anna Carey’s This is Not the Jess Show. Will we love the sequel This is Not the Real World? Or will this book be another A Snake Falls to Earth? You’ll have to tune in to find out. I think this is the first time we’ve covered a true sequel on our blog, so I’m excited to chat about it.
