Are you ready for the next reveal? So far I have shared the following choices:

• Picture Book Author Study – Duncan Tonatiuh
• Early Readers Chapter Books – Dragons in A Bag by Zetta Elliot

In a world that is upside down, still, I have found myself reaching for fantasy books more and more. As a way to learn about our past and consider our future, the realm of fantasy allows us to escape, dig in, and dream of what can be. While the worlds may be unfamiliar, their messages are not and we can find comfort, hope, joy, even in the darkest parts of their stories. Our Global Read Aloud choices offer up hope in the most human way; tales of overcoming, tales of finding your own strength, tales or relying on community to come together in order to defeat a common enemy. It is what the world has shown us in the past year as well, it is what has kept many afloat, many alive. And so we shall gather around these books and continue to build community. We shall share these read alouds as way to connect across city lines, country borders, and oceans. We shall hopefully find similarities within the heroic journeys of the stories we read that let us see how we, too, can be heroes in our way.

WHAT IS INFORMATION YOU MAY WANT RIGHT NOW?

• Kick off will be October 4th and the project will run for six weeks as usual, ending on November 12th. You can absolutely fall behind or start later, just don’t read ahead.
• The official hashtag for the year is #GRA21, other hashtags will be announced once all the books are.
• The hashtag for this book will be #GRAJumbies
• For a comprehensive FAQ post, go here
• To join the main Facebook group, please go here. To join the middle grade Facebook group, please go here. This is where news will be posted for the most part.

SO WHAT IS THIS YEAR’S MIDDLE GRADE BOOK….

Corinne La Mer claims she isn’t afraid of anything. Not scorpions, not the boys who tease her, and certainly not jumbies. They’re just tricksters made up by parents to frighten their children. Then one night Corinne chases an agouti all the way into the forbidden forest, and shining yellow eyes follow her to the edge of the trees. They couldn’t belong to a jumbie. Or could they?When Corinne spots a beautiful stranger at the market the very next day, she knows something extraordinary is about to happen. When this same beauty, called Severine, turns up at Corinne’s house, danger is in the air. Severine plans to claim the entire island for the jumbies. Corinne must call on her courage and her friends and learn to use ancient magic she didn’t know she possessed to stop Severine and to save her island home.

I have loved The Jumbies series for a long time and think that Tracey Baptiste is a national treasure, and for a long time I have wanted to use The Jumbies as one of our choices, well, this year feels like the right year. While this book may be a little bit scary for younger kids, it begs to be read aloud, discussed, lived in and also invites in beautiful conversations about finding your own strength, about folk and fairytales, about family and about love. It will draw in our readers with its action and mystery. It will leave us wanting to learn more.

The reading calendar will be as follows:

Week 1: Oct. 4th – 8th : Chapters 1 – 7

Week 2: Oct. 11th – 15th: Chapters 8 – 14

Week 3: Oct. 18 – 22nd: Chapters 15-21

Week 4: Oct. 25th – 29th: Chapters 22 – 26

Week 5: Nov. 1st – 5th: Chapters 27 – 39

Week 6: Nov. 8th – 12th: Chapters 40 – end

Don’t worry about falling behind, just don’t read ahead and if you need to start later, please do.

Please consider following Tracey’s work on social media and supporting your local independent bookstores with your book purchases. If you want to support the Global Read Aloud, please consider purchasing your books through the links placed here, the GRA gets a small affiliate percentage whenever books are purchased through Bookshop.org – a website that sends orders through local bookstores.  If your school requires you to go through Amazon, please consider using this link to purchase the book in order to support the Global Read Aloud.

I hope you like these choices, and if not, that’s okay too, then come back next year.