Elatsoe (Levine Querido, Aug. 25) is a highly original, atmospheric work of speculative fiction. Darcie Little Badger’s resourceful and courageous protagonist, an aspiring paranormal investigator, encounters vampires and is assisted by her best friend, who travels via fairy rings. Ellie, short for Elatsoe (hummingbird in Lipan), has a close-knit, supportive family and feels a strong bond with Six-Great-Grandmother, whose feats are legendary. Little Badger (Lipan Apache) is currently in Connecticut; we chatted over Zoom about her debut novel. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book is wonderfully difficult to categorize.

 I usually describe Elatsoe as a fantasy/mystery genre mash that’s about a teenager named Ellie whose cousin is killed under mysterious circumstances. The authorities think it’s an accident; she knows it isn’t, so she investigates his death in this really creepy Southern town named Willowbee and is helped by her friends, her family, and her ghost dog companion—because Ellie has the power to wake the ghosts of animals.

After writing short stories, what made you turn to a YA novel?

I actually found the exact moment when I decided to go young adult on Twitter. On Dec. 30, 2016, I tweeted, “Uuuuuuhhhhh whyyyyy. Realized that the main character in this book of mine needs to be in high school, so I’m rewriting the whole thing.” I think I’d written about 30,000 words, and it just wasn’t working—and it’s because the story needed the protagonist to be a teenager. I was going with the angle where she was already investigating stuff, but as soon as I made that switch, where she was in high school and she was still with her family and she had this ghost dog companion, everything just fell into place.

Elatsoe has such a rich grounding in a very specific setting—both its present geography and its past.

It’s set in South Texas, where a lot of my family lives. It’s the homeland of my ancestors, too. My mother was born and raised there, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my great-great-grandmother. We moved a lot when I was a child, but always South Texas would be this focal point, especially my grandmother’s 14 acres of land where the family could gather. So, thinking of Elatsoe, a lot of these sensory descriptions [are] based on that land in McAllen, Texas.

There are still far too few books featuring Indigenous characters outside of historical fiction.

I was a voracious reader growing up, but despite reading hundreds of books, I never read about a Lipan Apache protagonist. That’s never. After a while it gets a little bit discouraging. This was especially alarming when I went to high school in Texas, because we are the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, and yet I never read about us, and I certainly never learned about us in history class. It’s complete erasure. Reading a book like Elatsoe would have meant something to me. The most wonderful email I’ve received [came from] a Native mother [who] gave an early copy to her daughter, [who] loved it and read it into the night. There’s no feedback that could be better.

Asexual characters are also rare.

I thought it would be cool to have a young adult book where the protagonist is asexual, but that’s not a focus of the plot. I’m asexual, and I’m engaged to another asexual Native. My fiance and I met [through] an undergraduate organization, Native Americans at Princeton. There were five people there, and we two happened to meet. It’s got to be fate! [But] I was once told by somebody that if I was going to have a book without romance, then I should go middle grade. That didn’t seem right to me, because young adults love to read about all sorts of people so it’s not really a barrier, [and] it does provide that mirror to other asexual people who don’t see themselves very often.

I loved the way science was woven into the story.

I’m a geoscientist with a focus in oceanography, so that’s one reason why this ocean of the underworld plays a part in the book; there is this merging of all the creatures from millions of years ago to the present day—whales and trilobites in this ghostly ocean. I find in my fantasy and science fiction, my scientific background leaks in in interesting ways. I was an intern studying the spread of invasive plants across the United States as an undergraduate, and in the book there are these scarecrow monsters that act like invasive plants, spreading across the U.S., displacing the endemic monsters.

What was it like working with Rovina Cai? Her illustrations add so much.

She didn’t just do the cover; every chapter of the book has an illustration, and they actually tell a story within a story of Ellie’s Six-Great-Grandmother that eventually connects to the main plot. I first provided her with a script—it was in a format similar to a comic strip. And then she provided sketches, and there was a lot of consultation about the outfits of the characters, because even though it’s a fantasy alternate universe, I did want the historical clothing to be what Lipan people would have worn. I [also] provided pictures of living Lipan people as references. The art is so beautiful—I’m so grateful for her.

So much of the book is relevant to present-day debates over the stories we tell about this country.

One of the core themes of the book is: How does a young adult like Ellie seek justice in a world that is often stacked against her? I really hope that America becomes a place that is equitable for people of all races, all sexualities, all genders. What I want it to become is a land where my people, the Lipan Apache, could once again flourish on our homeland. That’s something that people are fighting for now and have been fighting for for a while. That’s the future I want to see, and I will continue to fight for it personally. We live in that area around the Rio Grande, and I just learned from my mom a couple weeks ago [that] my grandmother didn’t know there was a [U.S.–Mexico] border when she was a child. There have been historically a lot of conflicts in that area, but [the border is] also something that traditionally didn’t exist.

What do you hope young readers will take away from Elatsoe?

Something that the book returns to a couple of times is the story of Icarus. I sometimes find this sort of story [is] almost weaponized against young adults who want to accomplish great things. So, one thing that I hope that Elatsoe conveys is that it is possible to do great things, even when people tell you that you can’t or you shouldn’t. It’s possible to defy corrupt institutions or individuals with power or wealth or positions of authority. That does relate to current events; it’s also something that is timeless.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.