Into the Wild: We Became Jaguars by Dave Eggers

MY GRANDMOTHER CAME TO VISIT. I HAD MET HER ONCE, BUT SHE LIVED FAR AWAY.

HER HAIR WAS WHITE AND VERY, VERY LONG.

But when the boy's parents go out and leave him with his grandmother, she has a strange suggestion. She gets down on all fours on the carpet.

LET'S BE JAGUARS," SHE SAYS.

And as they crawl off the rug, they become jaguars, making their way through the tall grasses to the cul de sac and then into the woods. The boy has been there before, but never as a jaguar. The birds and squirrels flew and ran way when the two jaguars together leap lithely into the branches of a dark tree.

His jaguar grandmother ate a rabbit she caught.

I SAID I WAS ALLERGIC.

WE JAGUARED ON.

The two run sleekly up a mountain and see the world laid out before them. They drink the divine water from a lake and run across the ocean so nimbly that they do not even get their feet wet. They stop to rest somewhere in the Himalayas.

I REMEMBERED I HAD SCHOOL. "I SHOULD GO BACK SOON," I SAID.

And his grandmother drives him to school just in time, in Dave Eggers' brand-new adventure, We Became Jaguars (Chronicle Books, 2021). With Dave Eggers' sybillant storytelling and the beautifully dreamlike mixed media scenes in Woodrow White's illustrations, this is a very different visit from Grandma, to say the least, a fantasy that youngsters will want to relive over and over. Says School Library Journal, "The playfulness isn't restricted to language. White's illustrations are ... sumptuously depicted. . . . . So fantastic it feels real, or so real that it feels fantastic?"