Sheine Lende by Darcie Little BadgerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book is a prequel to Elatsoe , set fifty years earlier and focusing on Elatsoe's grandmother, Sheine Lende, or Shane as she is commonly known. Shane and her mother, Lorenza, and their two bloodhounds (actually three with Nellie the ghost hound) find missing people. The book opens with them working a case, and as the story continues Lorenza vanishes while working another case, along with the little brother of one of Shane's friends. This book is the story of the lengths Shane will go to, up to and including visiting the land of the dead, to get her mother back.
Although that point is one of the more interesting things about this story. I noted in my review of Elatsoe that I wished the author would reveal more about her world, and this does happen here to some extent (although not as much as I would have liked). We are talking here about an alternate history and alternate world, where ghosts, the fae, faery rings, and the land of the dead are real things that exist:
Typical fairy rings always grew in pairs, living and dying together. It was part of their alien biology: they weren't two separate rings, but one ring in two places. The fae realm, from which magic spilled onto Earth, was a place of spatial and temporal anomalies. Space and time could be stretched, refracted, and reassembled like the building blocks in a child's play pen.
Simply put, it was impossible for a typical fairy ring to exist--much less function--in just one point on the globe.
Yes, some of the verbiage is the usual fantasy/urban fantasy terminology. But you notice the use of more scientific concepts to desribe what is going on? That pushes this book more towards the realm of science fiction, at least as far as I am concerned. Maybe a hybrid of the two, straddling the divide of a simple categorization. This also extends to the characters, and Shane, her friends, and her grandfather are not your usual fantasy people. Shane, in particular, is a lot like her granddaughter Elatsoe, thoughtful and practical and determined to set things right.
Shane travels a far distance in this story, whether it's to the land of the dead or another planet and solar system (I lean more towards the latter, and Shane describes the constellations she sees in the "land of the dead" as nothing like Earth's). The relationships between Shane and her friends take center stage here, and she uses the fairy rings--and their time-travel capabilities--to bring her mother home. The epilogue of the book takes place some fifty years later, with Shane and Elatsoe visiting the same fairy ring where Lorenza reappeared, to welcome a man who has been lost for longer in time than Shane's mother was.
It's not the best young adult novel I've read this year (that would be this), but it's entertaining enough.
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