Set in the Northwest Territories (Canada) and drawing on indigenous legends and the authors own experience, this book is quite beautiful and dreamlike in parts. Tales of shapeshifters and sky spirits and immortals from the distant past to the near future, almost reads like short stories but all interconnected. I liked the way modern themes were included and explored.

As a latina, the prose-poetical blend of magic and reality is a very familiar form of storytelling to me. This beautifully written epic kept my attention from start to finish.

There’s a lot to appreciate about this debut novel. It brings the northern region of Canada and the traditional lands of the Indigenous people there to life with all its natural power and beauty. The story moves through time, weaving in the supernatural and the mythological. The close ties people and land are clear and the region is portrayed as one of immense beauty. The natural world and the supernatural are also shown as only thinly separated. Katłıà weaves in elements of traditional storytelling as well as creations of her own. A Dene author from northern Canada, Katłıà is obviously drawing from a lot of her own experience and background.

The story begins a millennia ago, the very beginnings of humankind, when an immortal, powerful being known as the Nąą́hgą hunts humankind, taking a human woman under his spell as his wife. We move forward to time to a young couple on the run from this Nąą́hgą, the woman a mysterious Sky Spirit about to give birth to her first child. That child grows up on a remote Northern alone, watching over the first people to arrive, eventually following them to the mainland where he watches their lives change dramatically with the arrival of white settlers. We move into the modern day, for a while returning to that remote island with a young archeology student who may be more than she appears. The ancient beings that have been the thread through the story appear in new forms but with familiar motives.

There is so much imagination here and I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, it never quite found its footing. In the end, I felt like I was reading a novel that needed to go through another draft or two. There were hints of an epic story but the thread running through to connect the characters wasn’t quite strong enough. It was a modern day myth but never fully brought out. There were too many unanswered questions for me at the end and in the final section, it seemed that the author was attempting to create a new point of view by introducing a brand new perspective that wasn’t given enough time for it to fully work for me.

Perhaps I could have forgiven a lot of this if I’d felt connected to any of the characters. Moving through time and stories meant that we never stayed long enough with any one character to really get to know them and thus the stakes never felt particularly high to me. At the same time, a lot of what we learn is from simply being told by third person narration. Over and over I wanted the narration to step back so that I could observe the characters, learn their motives through observation rather than being told what I was looking at.

I will be very curious to see what Katłıà writes next. I’d love to read more from this imaginative and creative writer but hopefully with a more focused storyline.

Ancestral storytelling in the style of the old ways. I could imagine an elder telling these stories of the multiple lifetimes of a family and community history and how generational scars continue to haunt the children of the future. I did have a little trouble with my attention span and getting lost in the complicated names and in the fable like writing style. Someone who enjoys epic fiction spanning multiple generations combined with legends, lore, mysticism and the supernatural would likely enjoy this book. #netgalley #Land-Water-Sky/Nde-Ti-Yat'a

Land-Water-Sky was unlike any book I’ve ever read before, and in the best possible way. It is beautifully and imaginatively written – and Katha has proven herself to be a skilled storyteller in this debut novel.

The book itself is about an island in Northern Northwest Territories and the spirits that are behind the legends. The narrative spans centuries, with ancient stories interwoven with modern tales, showing how the ancient shapeshifters still touch modern life.

The stories seem somewhat disconnected at times, but keep reading to find out that they are not.

I really enjoyed this book, anxiously turning pages at times, luxuriating in gorgeous, evocative writing at other times. I love how folklore and “reality” become one in this book.

This is a gem of a book and one that I will buy in paper copy just to have it on my shelf and to lend to others.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the review copy.

Katłıà has written a really impressive book with Land-Water-Sky. It’s set in a remote territory of what’s currently known as Canada, where we travel through numerous different stories. They all feature spirits that walk among the living and there is a very prominent sense that we are gaining insights into a post-colonial and pre-colonial world that might still exist if things had happened differently. I also think Katłıà does a really remarkable of showing us the effects of colonialism on the land, on families and intergenerational traumas, and on the connections Indigenous folx have to their own traditions and futures.

The spirits are sometimes really powerful and could read as either harmful or protective. I think the narrative does pull together in the last quarter or third, but I will admit that for the first half or so of the book, I struggled to keep track of time and space. I completely acknowledge why Katłıà arranged the book this way, but for some reason I *personally* had a hard time keeping everything straight as we went from chapter to chapter. Despite that - which I think is completely my own preference and shortcoming - this debut novel is haunting and the implicit depictions of alternate realities and Indigenous futurisms is so valuable. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book like this! For that reason, and because I am not from within the author’s community, I’m not docking stars from this; I know this book wasn’t written for me and I’m not well-versed enough in the oral histories and traditions of Katłıà‘s community to know whether the arrangement and portrayal of these stories is rooted in meaningful elements of culture.

I am excited for more people to read this and am looking forward to reading other readers’ reflections! Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this advance copy.

The Medicine Man knows many stories of the land, water, and sky; legends that had existed from time immemorial. 

The first two stories in Land-Water-Sky bring you back to medieval times. The writing style makes you feel like you’re reading a medieval manuscript in translation. Tales like Beowulf and Beauty and the Beast come to mind. But in this case, the Dene author Katłıà took her inspiration from the legends and myths of the Dene, an indigenous group living in the northern boreal and Arctic regions of Canada. 

The stories are set around Yellowknife (Coppertown in the book) with the fictional Nàejì Island resembling Nishi Island / Old Fort Rae. The names of the characters in the book are spelled in the Weledeh-Tłįchǫ language. Very real, but also somewhat hard to read, and you’ll probably resort to just reading the first letter of the names.

One of the reasons Katłıà wrote this book is to start discussions about violence in familial relationships. This is visible in the beauty and the (shapeshifter) beast story at the start, but also in the story of Lafì set in modern times. Half of the characters are kind and good, while their counterparts are beasts in disguise (both otherworldly and human). The stories show the harshness of unequal fights: men and women fighting against and alongside otherworldly creatures. If you bring it down to the essence, it can be about any unequal conflict between humans as well.

I liked the first two stories the most because of the writing style. The more wordy, medieval-folk-tale-like writing style Katłıà used helped the immersion. This is where her strength lies. I was less fond of the writing style in the other stories. Then, after a forgettable intermezzo introducing Louie and the ghost on the road, the longer story of Deèyeh followed to link the past to the present, explaining it all, except for what I wanted to know about her past. 

It feels like Katłıà missed a chance here. If she had continued that story, instead of switching to Lafì to tell the other side of the story, Land-Water-Sky would have been a better book. I wanted to read more about Deèyeh and her friend. It would have been so nice if the author had finished the book from their point of view.

To conclude: after a mesmerizing start, Land-Water-Sky almost ended up an unexpected gem if not for the second part of the book. Still, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading the stories, finishing the book in one sitting. The setting, the Northwest Territories in Canada, is also very original. Do pick up this book if you like stories based on mythology and legends from a culture many of us don’t know much about. These stories certainly make me want to visit the northern part of Canada as they show the beauty of nature.

There is a lot of promise in this story, and there were scenes that I found imaginative. Katłıà's second novel is likely to intrigue me more than this debut novel does, though.

Some of the writing here strikes me as trending toward cliché, for instance, on the first page we get the phrases: "broad shoulders"..."impressive jawline"..."chiseled face."

There are long sections of the novel written in narrative summary, and these sections have, to my thinking, a generic flatness: "It didn't take long for Deèyeh to find her calling, Her aptitude pointed her in the direction of archeology, a field she instinctively knew she would do well in..." and so on.

First novels need to be written. They're just the beginning of the writer's journey. I can't help but think that this author will find her voice in a coming novel, given the level of passion and commitment and community support that she expresses in her acknowledgments.

Land-Water-Sky/Ndè-Tı-Yat’a is the debut novel from Dene author Katłįà, and as she writes in her Acknowledgments at the end of this book, her inspiration was to honour her people's tradition of storytelling – suppressed for too long – by adding her voice to that long tradition “with honesty and meaning”. Set in the Northwest Territories – and covering the events in that area from “Time Immemorial” through to the year 2030 – Katłįà focusses her story on legendary characters, both good and evil, and their interactions with both the first peoples of the land and those who came later. In the tradition of Cherie Dimaline and Eden Robinson, Katłįà imagines a world in which myths from Indigenous storytelling walk among modern humans, and often, the results are hair-raising. I wouldn't be being honest if I didn't note that the writing can be unpolished here (both the small and the large; in the sentences and in the overall structure), but I was always interested to know what would happen next and open to learning whatever Katłįà wanted to share with her readers .Mahsi cho for that learning.