Curse of the Night Witch (Emblem Island, 1)

When I first read through this book, I was impressed by its generous and novel worldbuilding. Rather than being set on a subcontinent or zoomed-in region in a larger landscape, it was set on a huge island. It had edible gemstones that were apparently fairly common and had specific flavors. I liked how, rather than being a fantasy-European sort of setting, it made mention of South American fruits, and included (what I thought to be) made-up fantasy-world berries like moraberries stated in the same breath as tropical fruits. Its underlying mythic or magical worldbuilding felt so original.

Then I learned this book, rather than being crafted from whole cloth, was based on Columbian folklore stories the author's grandmother told her.
Sure, the protagonist's little sister is named "Rosa", and one of the monsters has notable similarities to the Hispanic folklore figure La Llorona, a wailing woman who drowned her children, but I figured Rosa was a common multicultural name and the La Llorona reference was just making a patchwork out of cool things. But no: those were clear indications this book was based on some sort of Hispanic folklore. And moraberries? They're real. They're a kind of blackberry found from Mexico to Bolivia.

I'm sure seeing more Columbian-folklore portrayals has made people very happy. Maybe tapping into rarely-seen folklore is part of why this book got so many accolades. But I've seen many, many myth/folklore-inspired middle grade fantasy books: in fact, it's much of the point of the Rick Riordan and Rick Riordan Presents imprint books, many of which I've read in the past few months. While it's good to see the 1st Columbian mythology book among the 1st Cuban, 1st Sumerian (!), 2nd Korean, 1st Thai, 1st Hmong, 3rd American Southwest/roughly "North Mexican", 3rd Egyptian, 4th Scandinavian, 10th Chinese Mythology, 10th Indian mythology book and (at minimum) 17th Greek/Roman mythology books in my extensive collection of read books, I wish this kind of rich, interesting worldbuilding could also exist without leaning on pre-existing real-world stories.