El Chupacabras by Adam Rubin - OPTIONAL

El Chupacabras by Adam Rubin, illustrated by Crash McCreery.  PICTURE BOOK Dial Books for Young Readers, 2018.  $17.  9780399539299  

BUYING ADVISORY: EL (K-3) – OPTIONAL  

AUDIENCE APPEAL: AVERAGE  

Carla lives with her father Hector on a farm with goats.  One night they hear a creepy sound and when they wake in the morning one of the goats has been made into a goat pancake.  Hector proceeds to tell Carla about “el Chupacabras”, or the goat sucker, who attacks goats, not killing them, but makes them flatten out.  Hector goes and gets magic dust from a beautiful flower lady and when he puts the dust on the goats they grow ginormous and start to head for town.  To solve this problem, Hector has to enlist the help of the Chupacabra to flatten the goats down to normal size.  

I wish I could recommend this book on the illustrations alone.  The goats have the funniest facial expressions and the pictures are fantastic.  The story is entertaining and fun, but I found it hard to read the mixture of English and Spanish text.  Within each sentence is a mix of  half English and half Spanish and it repeats itself so that if you cut and paste while reading you can get the whole meaning, but unless you speak Spanish it makes it hard to read aloud.  

C. Peterson