A Snake Falls to Earth is a young adult modern fantasy novel by Darcie Little Badger. The novel follows two protagonists: Oli, a cottonmouth shapeshifter from the Reflecting World, a place of magical monsters and spirits that is intimately tied to Earth, and Nina, a Lipan Apache girl living in Texas whose family has a nearly forgotten connection to the Reflecting World. A Snake Falls to Earth alternates between following Nina in third-person limited narration and Oli’s first-person narration of his adventures. Little Badger’s expertise in geological science weaves together with her experience as a member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas to create a story that deals with themes like Climate Change and the Natural World, Indigenous connections to land and storytelling, and the power of Found Family in the wake of disaster.

Published in 2021, A Snake Falls to Earth is a work of Indigenous Futurism, an artistic movement that centers Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. In literature, Indigenous Futurism usually incorporates elements of fantasy and/or science fiction.

This guide uses the Levine Querido eBook version of A Snake Falls to Earth, formatted for Nook. Page numbers may differ slightly in other versions.

Content Warning: This guide contains references to colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.

Plot Summary

Nina Arroyo is a Lipan Apache girl living in Texas with her mother, Alicia, and her father, Richie. The novel follows Nina from age nine to age 16. Her father runs the family bookstore by himself while her mother is away for months at a time on scientific surveys on the ocean. Richie’s mother and great-grandmother (Nina’s grandmother and her great-great-grandmother, Rosita) live on land that has been in the family for generations. When Rosita is on her deathbed in the hospital, she tells Nina a story in the Lipan language, interspersed with Spanish, that Nina relies on a translation app to understand. The app cannot process Lipan (or any other Indigenous language), so the story is mangled and unintelligible. Rosita dies before anything can be clarified, and Nina learns soon after that Rosita lived for more than 150 years.

In Nina’s reality, there are two worlds: Earth and the Reflecting World. Once, they were united and called the Joined World, but by Nina’s day they have been distinctly separate worlds for thousands of years. The Reflecting World is a reflection of Earth, and points of contact between these two worlds exist in hidden places. In the Reflecting World, the sun is called the “pseudosun” and is actually a portal to Earth, not a star. Objects and people from one world cannot last long in the other. The main inhabitants of the Reflecting World are animal people, shapeshifters who exemplify characteristics of a particular species of animal on Earth. Animal people retain traits from their animal form in their human form; for example, cottonmouth people have white insides to their mouths, poor vision, and scales for eyebrows. The health of animal people reflects the health of their kin species on Earth. Extinction in one world means extinction in the other.

Unbeknownst to Nina, her father’s side of the family descends from the union of a spirit from the Reflecting World and a human woman: Rosita was their daughter. The land Nina’s grandmother and Rosita live on acts as a gateway between the two worlds, giving the land magical properties and often hosting visiting animal people in disguise. Rosita’s spirit parent and older brother were killed by the Nightmare, the sole human spirit who remains on Earth and who kills off any other spirit that dares to cross over. It is believed that the Nightmare caused the splitting of the worlds.

As Nina tries across the years to decode Rosita’s historia, she learns more about her family’s connection to the Reflecting World and begins to suspect spirits from it continue to visit Earth—including her father’s bookstore. Meanwhile, her family contends with the complaints of Grandma’s neighbor, Paul, who seems to want to evict her from her land to buy the property himself.

Interspersed with scenes from Nina’s life is the story of Oli, a cottonmouth from the Reflecting World. Like all cottonmouths, Oli has to leave home as a teenager. Oli initially struggles but eventually finds a group of friends and a home by a “bottomless” lake. One of his new friends is Ami, a Dallas toad person. Dallas toads, in Nina’s world, are an endangered species. When hurricane season rolls around, made worse by climate change, it destroys the Dallas toads’ last sanctuary, threatening the species with extinction. Ami falls ill from this and will die if the Dallas toad population doesn’t recover. Oli and his friends Risk, Reign, and Brightest (along with a troublemaking mockingbird who stalks them) travel to Earth to save the Dallas toads.

Nina’s father is the only human the animal people know as a potential ally, so the group goes to the bookstore for help and finds Nina. Nina agrees to help, and they in turn promise to help her grandmother; another hurricane is scheduled to hit in three days, and Grandma cannot venture far from her land without becoming ill. Nina’s plan is to create a viral video of the animal people (in their animal forms) to raise funds for the Dallas toad. However, when she submits the video to her chosen content creator, she finds that she barely receives any of the revenue.

Meanwhile, Nina and the animal people arrive at her grandmother’s home. They avert disaster by using magic to manipulate a tornado (caused by the hurricane) around Nina’s grandma’s home and then trap it in a container. Paul is revealed as an agent of the Nightmare, searching for a connection to the Reflecting World to kill spirits that cross over. He shoots Oli, but Nina’s grandmother is a close enough descendent of her spirit ancestor to be able to heal people when they are dying, saving his life. Oli returns the favor by briefly taking Nina’s family to the Reflecting World to save them from the armed hunter. While they are there, Paul opens the container holding the tornado, presumably dying in the ensuing storm.

Nina and her family return to Earth, and Nina learns that Mockingbird posed as the content creator and donated a significant amount of money to the Dallas toad sanctuary. The novel ends with all of the animal people safe in the Reflecting World, where further adventures await them on a commandeered steamboat with a healthy Ami.