The Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste

The Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste
Algonquin, 2015.

11 year-old Corrine lives on a Caribbean island that was inhabited by jumbies long before any people arrived. The malicious jumbies, who take all shapes, now live in the forest and the people keep away from it, but when Corrine goes in there, it triggers a whole chain of disastrous events.

Corrine lives with Pierre, her father; her mother died a long time ago and all she has left to remember of her is a stone pendant. Unbeknownst to her and Pierre, her mother was a jumbie who was won over by love. But now her evil sister, Severine, is out to get revenge on Corrine, Pierre, and the whole island population.

Tension is ratcheted up when Severine magically ensnares Pierre, and incites the jumbies to pour out of the forest to re-claim their original home. It is left, as the reader will already have guessed, to Corrine and her new friends, Asian Dru and orphan brothers Bouki and Malik, all well-rounded characters with virtues and flaws that make them authentic and likeable, to restore balance back to the island.

Inspired by Haitian folklore and written by Trinidadian Baptiste, there is a lusciously evocative sense of place, both the cerulean radiance of the coast and village, and the malevolent gloom of the forest. And though many of the folklore aspects of the tale will be familiar – sinister stepmother, changelings, heroine tested to her limits – the unfamiliar traditions of it make for an enticing and creepy read.

Hansel & Gretel re-told by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti

Hansel & Gretel re-told by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti
Toon Graphics, 2014

In 2007, Lorenzo Mattotti created India ink drawings for an exhibit accompanying the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of Hansel & Gretel. These illustrations are now published with Neil Gaiman’s re-telling of the story, in a splendid picture book for older children.

Gaiman’s story is a fairly straightforward version of the tale, going back to the Grimm original – in which it is the heartless mother, not a stepmother, who persuades the rather feeble father to lose his children in the forest; and it is Hansel, the younger sibling, who lays the trails of pebbles and then breadcrumbs, not Gretel.

Food plays a prominent role in the story which makes it feel more real and less like a fairytale: Gaiman lays out the reasons for the lack of anything to eat – war and weather – leading to the abandonment of the children, and in the historical note at the end, it is suggested that in the Great Famine of 1315 this did actually happen along with the cannibalism that leads to the abundance at the old woman’s cottage.

The writing is conversational, and having just seen Neil Gaiman in person, I could hear his voice in the rhythm of the words and the construction of the sentences. This low key, almost informal, style makes for a more chilling contrast with the horror of the story: in fact, the old woman’s intentions towards Hansel are rather casually slipped in, as though, really, roasting young children is something of an everyday occurrence.

Mattotti’s illustrations are anything but low key: great swirls of dark ink loom and lours ominously over and around the small, silhouetted children; and white is used only sparingly to show, for example, the outlines, the bones as it were, of the old woman’s cottage. Whereas Gaiman’s text is casual, and all the more creepy for that, the artwork, by contrast, is dramatic and bold. But together the words and the pictures work to present a fresh, if not original, take on a well-known tale, and one that would make a marvelous readaloud for older kids.