What the Jaguar Told Her

Jade O'Callaghan is starting the 8th grade friendless in a new city. Atlanta isn’t home, and she just wants to go back to Chicago, where her abuela can tell her all the stories her abuelo never got the chance to share.

But there is something about Atlanta’s lushness that’s making Jade’s fingertips itch for her paintbrushes for the first time in forever. And she likes that she can walk to her new school on a path that winds through the woods directly behind her house, where exotic flowers bloom and fragrant leaves crunch beneath her feet. She sometimes feels as though it’s listening to her.

On the path, Jade meets an extraordinary person who exists between dreams and reality: an elderly jaguar-shaman named Itztli. In the late, reddening afternoons when Itztli appears, he steps out of the forest as a lithe, agile jaguar. But when he speaks to Jade, he does so in human form, as an old man, hunched and weak. Itztli tells Jade Mexican stories from before the Europeans came, and stories about his own life, which weave together indigenous strands from Georgia and Mexico. At first, Itztli’s stories seem far removed from Jade’s reality (which keeps her plenty occupied). But as Itztli tells Jade of a life navigating change and war through art and story, Jade begins to learn the patience and strength that it takes to, as Itztli says, ‘be jaguar’, and she feels the stirrings of an ancient power awakening within her.

What the Jaguar Told Her is a lyrical debut about growing up in the midst of change, and a magical cultural homecoming.