Starred Review: CHILDREN OF OWL by Darcie Little Badger

Horn Book Magazine: In this imaginative work of speculative fiction with a highly visual format, Lipan Apache cousins Maisie, Joel, and Verona work together to understand the strange events happening in their southwest Texas trailer park and solve their attendant mysteries.. After the shapeshifting son of Big Owl, the legendary father of birds, warns Maisie that a tragedy will soon befall someone in her community, she becomes determined to prevent another calamity; she has already lost her best friend to cancer, and an older cousin is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Meanwhile, Verona is housesitting at a ranch haunted by a vengeful ghost, and Joel is fostering a batch of kittens—though one of those kittens isn’t what it seems. Little Badger’s (Sheine Lende, rev. 5/24) layered storytelling expertly weaves the cousins’ distinct personalities and separate plotlines into a seamless, suspenseful mystery. The book excels in plot construction and in the complex development of its main characters as well as in its themes of systemic injustice, grief, coming of age, and Indigenous heritage and identity. Well-crafted prose passages, letters, and diary entries propel the tale toward its dramatic conclusion. Some portions of the story are told through Rajunov’s expressive, often atmospheric full-color comic panels; occasional digital spot art is also interspersed.