New West Children's Book Review

Chupacabras Explained in New Children’s Picture Book

By Jenny Shank, 8-22-08

The Fairy and the Chupacabra and Those Marfa Lights
By James A. Mangum and Sidney Spires
John M. Hardy Publishing, 25 pages, $17.95

I’ve been interested in southwestern folklore ever since I was a first grader soaking up the frightening tales of La Llorona my classmates told out on the playground.  Since then I’ve asked everyone to share their version of the La Llorona ("the weeping woman") story, including my Guatemalan guide in Tikal, who began his tale—as the best storytellers do—with: “My uncle saw her once.”

Besides La Llorona, the most charismatic figure in southwestern folklore has got to be the Chupacabra, whose name means “goat sucker,” and is described by Wikipedia as a “legendary cryptid rumored to inhabit parts of the Americas.” In their picture book The Fairy and the Chupacabra (for children aged four to eight), James A. Mangum and Sidney Spires have portrayed the Chupacabra as a winged beast with green, purple-polka-dotted skin and pointy teeth who is “the most misunderstood of creatures.”

As the Chupacabra explains to a fairy named Javier, he doesn’t suck the blood of goats, as popular accounts would have it.  Instead, he merely enjoys watching them.  “To chupas, watching goats is like humans watching television.  It is sheer entertainment.” And far from being a bloodsucker, he’s a vegetarian, using his long fangs for “sucking the nectar out of the sotol flower.”

Set in West Texas, the book features Mangum’s charming, colorful illustrations of regional flora, landscape, and fauna, such as the javelinas that Javier likes to ride, and big-eyed pronghorns, or “fluffy bottoms.” The Fairy and the Chupacabra is sprinkled with Spanish throughout, words that are easy to understand from the context and that are also defined in a glossary in back.

Javi and Marisol are the children of a fairy family named de Veras that lives in the Glass Mountains near the village of Marathon.  Their father is el rey de las hadas, the king of the fairies, and their mother is the queen.  Javi is mischievous, and likes to go out riding pronghorns and javelinas, and one day he encounters a Chupacabra, who detains him long enough that his family begins to worry.  The responsible Marisol sneaks out to retrieve her brother. 

The story concludes in a big party, with the glowing fairies dancing and singing songs about Chupacabras, and their luminance produces the “Marfa lights.” I hadn’t heard of these before, but according to Wikipedia, “The Marfa lights…are unexplained lights (known as ‘ghost lights’) usually seen near U.S. Route 67 on Mitchell Flat east of Marfa, Texas.” Thus, the book serves to explain to little ones and render benign two mysterious regional phenomena—the Marfa lights and the legend of the Chupacabra.

The only drawback to The Fairy and the Chupacabra is that there is a lot of exposition and explanation that delays and is interspersed with Javi’s adventure.  But apparently this is the first book of The Fairy and the Chupacabra series, so hopefully the adventures will move along at a faster clip in books to come now that the characters and settings have been established.

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