A Snake Falls to Earth
“They aren’t human, they’re from the Reflecting World, Grandma. … Aren’t they wonderful?”
A nine-year-old Lipan Apache girl named Nina records ancient stories told by her dying great-great-grandma Rosita, while around the same time a teenage cottonmouth animal person Oli is cast from his home in the Reflecting World. Over the next six years, Nina’s and Oli’s adventures unfold in two parallel plots. In the Reflecting World inhabited by animal people and originator beings, Oli builds a home. When the toad Ami falls ill, Oli and other animal people realize that the sickness is the approaching extinction of Ami’s species: Texas toads. On Earth, Nina explores the meaning of Rosita’s stories, especially about animal people, as well as the secrets of their family’s ancestral land—which turns out to be a portal to the Reflecting World. When Oli and his animal companions “fall to Earth” (235), they meet Nina and use their world-bending skills to trap a tornado, saving Nina’s family and property. Nina, in turn, raises funds to restore the hurricane-flooded habitat of Texas toads. Through an ingenious multi-species partnership, the plan succeeds beyond expectations. Ami is healed, the animal people return to the Reflecting World, and Nina connects with other Gulf storytellers to share stories about the hurricane’s aftermath.
A Snake Falls to Earth brings together five large climate literacy themes: Indigenous land stewardship, the impact of global heating in the American Southwest, climate change-driven biodiversity loss, the real-life meaning of climate justice, and the power of human-animal kinship. In Nina’s plot, the mystery of the unique qualities of her ancestral land are explained by the land being “a part of the Earth that pulls on the Tethered world” (297) of spirit beings. Rosita falls sick when she is separated from the land, and the land holds power to heal people and animals. Indigenous land stewardship emerges, effectively, as both critical to preserving the world’s biospheric inheritance, unique ecosystems, and biodiversity—the baby Texas toads are eventually found on Rosita’s land (367)—and intimately tied to Indigenous languages and knowledge traditions that remember a time when humans, plants, and animals lived together in “the joined era” (194). Nina’s family is revealed to be descended from human spirits as protectors of life.
Another theme is how global heating is transforming South Texas, which is becoming “the peril zone” (45), especially for the elderly. “That kind of temperature change usually happens over generations,” Grandma Rosita explains to Oli. “A human body shouldn’t live through it” (325). Starting in the middle of the book, Nina’s primary concern is the approaching hurricane, compounded by the fact that Rosita cannot be moved away from the land. Nina knows that the impacts of climate events will likely accelerate, possibly forcing the family to relocate or become climate refugees (87-88). Issues of climate justice—the need to balance climate impacts’ vulnerabilities to responsibilities—are central to Nina’s new storytelling project at the end of the book (361). She is concerned about ecosystems destruction caused by climate-driven events and concerned by human suffering, which is especially acute for the poor, Indigenous and marginalized communities of color.
The entire story is narrated by animal person Oli—rather than a human narrator—which sidelines anthropocentrism in favor of an ecocentric perspective that highlights how all lives are interconnected within the web of life. Shape-shifting animal persons—whose false form is human—are central to the story, showcasing the joy of human-animal kinship both in the Reflecting World and on Earth. The plot includes a number of other interesting themes—Nina’s AI assistant Nifty, Nina’s growth as a storyteller, the threat posed by the forces of destruction led by the Nightmare, and Oli’s exploration of the Reflecting World—but all of them are couched in a larger framework: a message that the world is wonderful and alive, that it needs stories and coalitions to protect it from destruction.
©2025 ClimateLit (Marek Oziewicz)
Publisher: Levine Querido, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64614-092-3
Pages: 372
Format: Novels
Topics: Ancestral Knowledge, Anthropocentrism, Biodiversity, Biodiversity Loss, Biospheric Inheritance, Climate Action, Climate Justice, Climate Literacy, Climate Refugees, Conservation, Drought, Ecocentrism, Ecosystems, Environmental Destruction, Extreme Weather Events, Flood, Global Warming, Hurricanes, Indigenous Environmental Practices, Indigenous Land Care, Indigenous Worldview, Kinship Worldview, Kinship with Animals, Rights of Nature, Web of Life
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