Children of Owl by Darcie Little Badger

Children of Owl, the latest young adult novel by Darcie Little Badger, came out October 6th! In it, Maisie, Joel and Verona are three Lipan Apache cousins in a trailer park in Texas. All teenagers, they love their family and want better from their world. When an animal person warns Maisie of an upcoming tragedy, they join forces with each other and with supernatural entities of the desert to protect their loved ones.

As Little Badger says in her Acknowledgements, “at its core, Children of Owl is a book about youth overcoming adversity, a theme that resonates throughout many Lipan Apache stories, including our ancient ones.” She goes on to say, “through stories, we are equipped with the knowledge that it’s possible to defy misfortune and cruelty.” Children of Owl is now one of the stories that can help equip young people with this knowledge.

Children of Owl meshes prose fiction, comics pages with art by Abigail Rajunov, and “handwritten” journal pages of the three protagonists to tell a multimodal but seamless story. These elements help make the story especially propulsive, and I would probably recommend it to tweens and young teens. The social justice and psychological elements are nuanced in a way that I think will spark thought and discussion for this age range.

For instance, the extremely wealthy white family that Verona works for is perfectly nice to her personally, even though they don’t respect her culture’s traditions. Maisie has intrusive thoughts that she recognizes as different from the voice of Owl, an invisible Animal Person who is her friend and wishes her well. The balancing of these different elements feels developmentally appropriate for young teens and thoughtful tweens.

There are also two deaths in the antecedent events of the story that haunt the main characters and everyone in their community. One is Mara, Maisie and Owl’s childhood best friend, who died young of cancer. The other is Paul, a young man who was murdered years ago. Their cousin Connor was wrongfully convicted of his murder, and imprisoned. The desire to get closure on one and justice on the other intertwine with the goal to avoid the upcoming tragedy Owl has warned Maisie about.

In Little Badger’s YA, I always appreciate that parents of teen characters are not presented as antagonists or absent. All of these characters have competent and present parents who love and respect them, and who work well as an extended family.

Given the stress on functional families, it is also refreshing that friendships outside of the family are also presented as valuable, reliable and real, whether those friendships are with normal human beings or with supernatural entities. Joel’s friendship with Carlsbad, Maisie’s with Mara, and Maisie’s with Owl are all robust and good for them.

I have enjoyed all of Little Badger’s work that I have read so far, which have been all of her YA novels,  and the short story collected into Revolution in the Heart, a recent anthology celebrating the enduring legacy of Ursula K. LeGuin. Next up for me, I am excited to also read her short story in the collection Never Whistle at Night: An Indiginous Dark Fiction Anthology, and her middle grades book, Tales from Cabin 23: The Sinking House.

Children of Owl is published by Levine Querido.