Darcie Badger: Hello, I'm Darcie Little Badger, and I'm the author of Elatsoe. Elatsoe is the story of a teenage girl and her ghost dog, Kirby. She spends the summer investigating the murder of her cousin in a really creepy town called Willoughby. What she uncovers are a lot of dark secrets.

The inspiration for this book is twofold. It started out when I was a teenager, I used to love reading scary stories. And in that process, I started writing my own scary stories, mostly short ones. One of those was about the ghost of a parrot and these group of teenagers, they go into a haunted house and they think it's haunted by a human. And it turns out it's haunted by a parrot that can talk. And in the end they find a way to release it.

Starting from there, I started thinking, what other types of supernatural powers could animal ghosts have? And I thought of mosquito ghosts that were able to draw droplets of blood into the air and they'd float around like this red mist, and ghosts of dogs who can do these big supernatural howls that could cause your eardrums to hurt. I decided I wanted to just combine all these ideas into a book and Elatsoe became the vessel for that. But really the greatest inspiration for the story itself is Ellie's quest for justice. And that's something that I think that young readers, especially, are constantly thinking about how do we find justice in this world?

It was just fun to see the entire book come together in the end. I say, it's my first book. I actually did write a couple of books when I was younger, one when I was in first grade, but this is the first that I actually got published. That's always such a daunting task. So it was a joy to me to see this book, not only come to life, but also to see the reaction from readers, and the overwhelming positivity of that has just been wonderful.

Primarily, when I write, what I want to do is to bring readers some joy, some escapism, because when I was a teenager and now that I'm an adult, I do turn to books for a lot of that happiness in my life. And they really saved me when I was younger. So I do hope that readers can be entertained by Elatsoe, that they can improve their lives in some way, if only a little bit. But I also hope that readers can take away a sense of empowerment and just know that there's a lot of injustice in this world. And it's going to take a lot of effort to fight that, but they can do it. People like them can do it.