The Jumbie God’s Revenge
(The Jumbies #3)
by Tracey Baptiste
Algonquin Young Readers, 2019
272 pages
Middle Grade (8 and up)
Crick!
Corrine and her island face a hurricane! This one hit a little too close to home as we watched real storms, big ones, hover over the Caribbean on The Weather Channel while we were reading this book. A second storm follows on its heels. These storms are too strong, and two in a row? It can’t be natural. Corrine confronts Mama D’Leau, throwing her mother’s necklace into the sea as an offering! But… Mama D’Leau seems weakened by the storm. She’s been fighting the currents herself, so it couldn’t be her causing this. To throw more tragedy into the mix, as the entire island watches its homes washed away, the White Witch dies.
While the storms rage past, Corinne sees a face in the clouds. Bouki and Malik tell the story of a god named Huracan who once separated the water and land jumbies to stop their bickering.
The boys offer to lead the villagers up into the mountains for safety amid deadly mudslides and torrential rains. Corinne and Dru get separated from the rest of the procession with Bouki and Malik, and the friends take shelter in a cave. They find a small village hidden high in the mountains, and the people there recognize the two boys who once lived alone in the caves. They are Ava and Diego’s sons, their Auntie Lu tells them. But their parents died; and though the villagers searched, they could not locate the two and gave them up for dead.
Corrine is suspicious, but they all spend the night… and Papa Bois appears to Corinne. He explains that there was a pact between the jumbies to keep to their own areas of influence. But now, with land jumbies in the sea (Severine) and sea jumbies on land (Mama D’Leau with her transformative opal,) Huracan is angered. He has decided to kill everyone on the islands, jumbie and human alike, and start again! Corrine feels partly to blame. She promises to retrieve her Aunt Severine from the sea. She says family should be given a chance to be forgiven.
But after Severine is returned home to the island, it’s not enough to quell the storms! Corinne gets mad… and becomes The Avatar! She discovers the power of a fire jumbie who can fly as well as that of land and water elementals! It all leads to a final explosive scene where Corrine squares off with Huracan while receiving assistance from some magical friends and her human family alike! How will they all be changed by this encounter?
The village becomes a role model as Victor starts with his jumbie hate again and the women of the island face him down. Severine’s loss of memory resulting from the events of the previous novel (Rise of The Jumbies,) allows her vengefulness to diminish and she is accepted back into the fold of the family. As a result of the devastating storms, refugees from other islands come to live on Corinne’s island, and at Dru’s sister’s wedding people are blended with jumbies to create an island family that can rebuild together. Mama D’Leau and Papa Bois embody this union by transforming themselves one final time into human form.
With the third installment of the series, the quality of the storytelling has incredibly become even more captivating! The Jumbie God’s Revenge captures the same suspenseful tension, taste of adventure, and awe of the supernatural that the first two books did. I very much hope that author Tracey Baptiste moves on to further explore the mythology of the islands as a backdrop for her next books! They are really a step above the rest. I’ve never seen my daughter so enraped by a book, she says this is the best Jumbies adventure yet!
As a beautiful, unspoken twist to the ending, as my daughter and I were looking on the Internet unable to get enough of Carribbean folklore, we read the following on River-Stories.com (paraphrased): “A soucouyant is a shape-shifter; by day she is an old woman, a recluse who lives on the edge of the town. At night, she sheds her skin and flies, as a ball of fire across the sky.” I looked at her and said, “See? That’s why The White Witch had to die in this book.” What magic.
Crack!
Related Posts:
The Jumbies
Rise of the Jumbies
The Jumbie God’s Revenge
Interview with Tracey Baptiste
