YA fiction based on The Magic Orange Tree

Do y’all follow Book Riot for recommendations? If not, you totally should. I have found so many great reads off their lists, particularly YA. They posted one the other day, A Reading List For Everyone Now Obsessed With Strangers Things (which I haven’t watched yet but know that I will). I borrowed a bunch from the library, and started with Tracey Baptiste’s The Jumbies. It’s aimed a bit younger than I normally read, but I still really liked it — and I love that I never would have heard of it (or the fairy tale the author based it on) without the power of the internet listicle!

Corinne La Mer (9 years old, I think?) and her father live on an island in the Caribbean. Corinne prides herself on not being afraid of anything — included the supposedly haunted forest behind their hut. At the beginning of the novel, she chases an agouti into the forest — and something sinister follows her out. Corinne starts to notice weird changes in her town…and her father. It’s up to her and her friends to save the rest of the town from the jumbies.

Corinne is a great main character — smart and brave and determined to save the day. The things we discover about her as the novel goes on surprised me greatly, and I love how the author wove them in. The afterword is cool, too, where we learn about the legends that this book sprung from. This would be a great book for pre-teen kids, but this 30 years enjoyed it, too!