A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger

 Nina has grown up with her grandmother and great grandmother's stories about the animal people from the land of spirits. Odd people visit her father's book store every week, and she secretly suspects they are from the other realm.  Oli is a cottonmouth person from the spirit world who is just learning to survive on his own.  When one of his best friends is threatened with extinction, he gathers up his courage, and a crew of loyal friends, to venture to the world above.  There, by chance, he meets Nina, and together they face down incredible forces. 

When the Newbery winner and honors were announced a couple of months ago, I went ahead and put them all on hold. This was an honor book, but I don't know why.  In the story a Native American girl meets a character from her culture's faith tradition. The cultural elements of the story were fairly interesting, but the pacing of the story was terribly slow. I think it could have been a good story but it needed an editor with a stronger hand to wrestle it into shape.  For instance, the two main characters don't even meet until were half way through the book.  The author could have started where Oli and Nina meet, fill in the backstory along the way, and the book would have been much more engaging.  The other main flaw was that the reader who read Oli's chapters wasn't very good.  He kept missing the natural flow of the sentences, so they often sounded stilted and unnatural. So, I am not sure why this book won an award, except that maybe someone on the committee thought Native American authors were underrepresented. (352 p. 2021)