El Chupacabras by Adam Rubin

 

Title: El Chupacabras 

Genre: Fiction, Folktale 

Author: Adam Rubin 

Illustrator: Crash McCreery  

Major Awards: Texas Bluebonnet Award  

Age group: 4 to 8 years 

 

Summary: 

This fictional picture book by Adam Rubin is a re-telling of the Spanish Literature chupacabra folktale. Carla and her father, Hector lived happily in a goat farm until one night one of their goats went missing. The next morning Carla found it flat as a pancake and they immediately knew that El Chupacabras (the goat sucker) had done it. The next day, the flower girl of the town gave Hector magic dust in order to protect his goats. He sprinkled too much on them and they turned into giant goats. Their only solution was to find that scary beast and ask for him to suck the goats so that they could return to their normal sizes. At the end of the story, El Chupacabras sucked the goats and everything was back to normal. 

Evaluation: 

Appropriate grade levels would be Preschool to 3^rd grade. The way Crash McCreery used this cinematically illustrations all throughout the book was really cool. I have never really seen books with this type of illustrations so it was new for me. 

I also loved the way Adam Rubin blended Spanish and English in order to re-tell this story. As a future Bilingual teacher, I will most definitely use this book in my classroom. In one of the sentences he would blend both languages, and then on the second sentence he would translate the first sentence. This mirroring technique would be very beneficial for second language students because they can see both languages. I would use this picture book as a found read-aloud for my students and let them see how he translates and moves around the words in the sentences.