If Your Babysitter is a Bruja is grin-along imagination play for four and up

At the intersection of soft education, entertainment, and the imagination of four-year-old lays If Your Babysitter is a Bruja. It’s an illustrated book with a Halloween spirit, but can be entertaining any time of the year. Bruja, as those broom-flying people know by its implication is that the book sprinkles in the occasional Spanish word. Really, I haven’t seen ay, caramba used this much since the first couple of seasons of The Simpsons.

That’s not a bad thing. If Your Babysitter is a Bruja is a fun story about a young girl whose parents are going out for the night. They call in a babysitter who rides up to the house on her bicycle and promptly starts sweeping the place with a broom. The youth makes her a delicioso cup of hot chocolate, which she doesn’t care for, so she whisks her away on her broom.

The witch drops her off at a castle, leading to a chase where the young girl is put into a vat of water with cocodrilos just waiting to eat her. Anyone that’s seen The Wizard of Oz knows that water is a witch’s worst nightmare and when she splashes her, reducing the witch to a pointed hat on the floor, she feels horrible. Suddenly the young girl is offered some Pan de Muerto, she’s also called ‘amiga’ from the bruja who is energetically appearing from the kitchen floor.

All evenings, even those with a bruja, must end and sleep comes for those who are being babysat. Of course, the bruja sends her off to bed with a loving chant, which could also be slightly evil, before flying out of the window on her broom or bicycle.

Even as you’re reading If Your Babysitter is a Bruja to young audiences they’ll wonder to themselves if it’s really about a witch who is a babysitter. This could simply be an allegorical tale about the imagination of young people that’s aimed at those who we don’t know what they could be thinking. They might be right about questioning the veracity as to if the babysitter is really a witch.

However, while they’re questioning this, they’ll also be having fun. The occasional word or phrase in Spanish is perfectly tossed in. They’re not in there so that the book can officially be deemed bilingual per se, rather, they’re there just to add some spice to the story. The audience is smart enough to read and accept some words that they don’t know because the pictures accompanying the story allude to what they mean.

Torre must mean tower because the young girl is shown just after being placed in it by the bruja. The other allusions will also lead those kids to question things. The sentences are simple and sometimes have divided placement within the pages. This way the art can logically lead readers to move the action while the words dangle above or below the art.

If Your Babysitter is a Bruja is a fun illustrated book with enough Spanish to bring in those who would otherwise be intimidated by a ‘bilingual book’. They’ll think of this more as a fun illustrated book, with some Spanish words that we previously didn’t know. You could also see the format of the book branching out into other words that lead into bilingual alliterations. If Your Teacher is a Tigre, If Your Dentist is a Dinosaurio for example, and if the art compliments the text as effortlessly as it does in this book the audiences will gamely follow along.

If Your Babysitter is a Bruja is by Ana Siqueira with art by Irena Freitas and is available on Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

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