The Secret Footprints - Alvarez
4 stars

Beautiful illustrations of a Dominican legend. I’d never heard of the mythical ciguapas before. Guapa, the bold and beautiful, is an antidote to Andersen’s little mermaid. She doesn’t allow her curious fascination with humans to lure her away from life she is meant to live. It’s a good read aloud story made better by the illustrations. ( )

This children’s picture book tells the Dominican Republic legend of the ciguapas – a race of extraordinarily beautiful people who live in caves beneath the sea and come onto land only at night. As a further way of ensuring they won’t be found their feet are on backwards, so anyone following their footprints will be led away from them rather than toward them.

I found this charming and entertaining. I liked the kindness displayed by both Guapa and the human boy and his family. Could not help but recall The Little Mermaid. The illustrations by Fabian Negrin are gloriously rich in color and bring me right to the tropics. ( )

The style of this book was like an ordinary book. They had pictures on each page along with text. The text was in paragraph form and they didn't have special formatting. Some parts of this book had lively language and the pictures did some of the "talking" for the text. This book was about the ciguapas and where they came from. ( )

Nicely illustrated picture book retelling a Dominican legend about the ciguapas, human-like people who live underwater and have their feet on backwards so their footprints lead away from where they've gone. Enjoyable. ( )

Summary

This book was a tale of the Ciguapas a magical people who lived under the water. The Ciguapas looked just like the people who lived on the land except that their feet pointed to the rear. This was so the land people couldn’t follow their tracks to find out where they lived. One day a young adventurous Ciguapas and was caught by a family that thought she had hurt herself and twisted her ankles badly. The people were nice to her and she realized that all the land dwellers were not all bad.

Personal Reaction

I enjoyed he story I seemed strange to me that they wouldn’t just go on land and introduce themselves and see what would happen.

Classroom Extension Ideas:

1. Have the children tell what they would do if they met a Ciguapas.
2. Have the children tell what would they have done if they were a Ciguapas. ( )