Middle grade/YA. Contemporary fantasy, I suppose. Follows a teen Lipan Apache girl on not-quite-our-Earth and a cottonmouth snake animal person in the world of animal people that is a sort of reflection of Earth, an alternate dimension with which it was once wholly joined but which is now only connected through a small number of difficult-to-travel paths. As you might expect, in the course of the former’s efforts to figure out the meaning of the final story her great-grandmother ever told her, and the latter’s to help his cute little toad friend in his moment of need, their paths eventually cross. Written with the sort of episodic rhythm of a storyteller, and the related sense of there being no absolute beginnings or endings but an endless stream of interconnected stories that you can only ever dip in and out of. And it has a kind of quiet matter-of-factness that I really enjoyed. I think I liked it better than her debut, because of its deliberate (but not obtrusive) efforts to play with craft.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.