Sheine Lende

Darcie Little Badger
Completed 7/16/2025, Reviewed 7/17/2025
4 stars

This YA novel is set in a universe established by the book Elatsoe, published a few years ago.  I did not read that book, but this one is a sort of prequel, centering on Elatsoe’s grandmother when she was seventeen-years-old in the late ‘60s or early 70’s.  It’s an alternate US, where magic and the faeries are known to humans and sometimes the two intersect in dangerous ways.   In this book, Sheine, known as Shane because most people can’t pronounce her name correctly, and her mother have a gift of finding lost people.  They are of Lipan Apache descent living in Texas.   The world building is really well done.  I didn’t feel lost by not having read the first book.  It deals with a lot of important issues about indigenous and poor people.  And yet it was very entertaining, feeling light with lots of humor despite some serious content.  This is another Lodestone nominee at the Hugo Awards.  With one book to go, I rank this a close second to The Maid and the Crocodile.

Shane’s mother, Lorenza, is called on a new search and rescue.  This time a teen girl and her young brother are missing after hiking along the train tracks.  Lorenza goes without Shane this time, despite Shane’s protestations.  Lorenza takes their ghost bloodhound with her and sets off on the search.  After a while, the ghost dog returns without Lorenza and Shane goes on a mission to find her mother.  She finds faerie rings and concludes that her mother and the two missing children walked into one and disappeared.  Shane calls on her often unreliable grandfather for help.  Together, with Shane’s younger brother, best friend, and the missing kids’ grandparents, they go looking for them.  Shane accidently walks into one, finds the older sister, and returns, but believes the younger brother and Lorenza may have been transported to the Underworld.  This becomes a quest to find out more about the power of the faerie rings and how a living person can return from the Underworld.

One of the best parts of this book for me was the unraveling of the history of the faerie rings.  It’s very well thought out and conveyed with ease.  I was also impressed by the revealing of the alternate Texas magic system.  It was done in such a way that it was a constant pleasant surprise as the story progressed.  Again, not having read the first book, I may have been at a disadvantage, but I didn’t feel like it.  When a book begins with a ghost bloodhound, you just know it’s going to be interesting.  Then when we find that Shane can call up ghost butterflies and fireflies, it’s all that much more fun.

Yet the story is very serious.  Over the course of the mystery, we find out about how Shane’s father, grandmothers, and one grandfather died due to a flash flood.  We learn of the hardship of growing up dirt poor and moving from shack to trailer trying to survive.  And we also learn of the history of the Lipan Apache people and how they were displaced and driven to poverty.  Searching for her mother brings all this to our and Shane’s attention, awakening strength in her that she didn’t know she had.  

Amidst this character development for Shane, she also becomes closer to her best friend and the girl she rescued.  It creates a friendship between them that only comes from surviving tragedy together.  It’s a powerful subplot, as Shane begins this story very much a loner.  The character arc of the unreliable grandfather is also interesting.  Shunned by her mother, she pushes her grandfather to explain more and more why he deserted the family so many times despite their need for him after all the deaths in the family.  This creates conflict and closeness that also helps Shane through the search for her mother.

I give this book four stars out of five.  While I was really engrossed in it, it felt kind of lightweight, especially after reading The Maid and the Crocodile.  However, it also felt like a much more YA oriented novel than any of the other nominees.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and loved Shane and her character arc.  I think I’ll have to read the first book because I think Little Badger is a writer who will produce some exciting things in the future.