While I have only read it once so far, this books feels like a book you read multiple times and never stop learning and noticing new things. This book spanned generations and looked at colonization in Brazil and the treatment of Indigenous Peoples. It was a moving work told through several characters and their perspective. It is hard to put into words everything this book accomplishes, but it's worth a read and its worth sitting with for a long time and considering the lessons we can learn.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-ARC!

The Jaguar's Roar by Micheliny Verunschk masterfully describes the journey of a kidnapped indigenous girl from the Amazon in the 19th century. Seen as a living specimen, she and an indigenous boy are brought to Europe and experience the loss that comes from being separated from their home, people, and culture.
I thought this book was powerful, well-written, and spoke about topics that are important and should be known by everyone. Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ACR of this wonderful book!

This was really, really fantastic, and so explicitly relevant for how Brazil is treating the Indigenous people of the Amazon. But it’s also relevant for how Canada treats the Indigenous, Métis, and Inuit of Turtle Island, or how Australia treats the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The whole purpose of the story is to imagine (not even reimagine, since records don’t exist in the first place) the events and lives of two Brazilian children (real people) who were stolen and brought to Europe by Spix and Martius (real people) in 1817.

The whole book is careful and intentionally misdirecting, attempting to confuse and subvert the reader. It gives voice back to these children, Iñe-e and Caracara-i (names gifted by Verunschk, as their real names are unknown and texts only refer to them by their tribe’s names Miranha and Juri, respectively). It also questions identity through a woman, Josefa, in modern day Brazil as she discovers the story of the children.

It’s a hard book to read, not just from a content perspective but from a technical and stylistic perspective. I highly recommend reading Barbassa’s translator’s note prior to reading the book, as it adds a lot of helpful context.

I am at a loss for words after reading this book and if you know me, then you know this is a rarity. The writing left me reading sentences, paragraphs sometimes whole pages over again just so I could stay tightly wrapped in the words which transported and left me wholly changed. The tale so timeless and heartbreaking yet although set so many years ago has much really changed? The story of a girl, a boy, a family, a village and the all knowing invaders that come to “teach” them how to live correctly. The Queens disciples who saw people as trade items. Taking kids away from their homes so they could what? Show them off to teach people in other parts of the world how backwards they were? I will never forget the story of the little girl who in her earliest years communed with the jaguar and became otherworldly. I am just not yet ready to close this book so in another very rare move I will go back now and reread beacause she deserves no less than this in her remembrance.

This slim, intense book takes a historical event--the kidnap of two indigenous children from Brazil and their trafficking to Europe, where they were exhibited, studied, and died--and turns it into a phantasmagoria of prose and poetry incorporating visions, spiritual encounters, the desires, and the resilience of the human mind, Author Verunschk conjures the Amazon and the cold towns of Europe easily and in ways that convey to the reader all of the senses the children experienced, creating endless paths their lives might have taken, and asking all of the questions their captors and viewers did not.