Magic, Reality and Good, Spare Writing in Ninth Ward

I’m always fascinated by writers who magic up the real world in a children’s book, and Jewell Parker Rhodes does exactly that in her Coretta Scott King Honor book, Ninth Ward.

The supernatural and the everyday blend beautifully in this 2010 novel. It's a Hurricane Katrina story, so I think it's appropriate to talk about it now, in the month that Katrina struck in 2005.

The novel is written in first person, in the voice of 12 year old Lanesha. It also features a wonderful adult character in 82-year old midwife and magical woman Mama Ya-Ya, who delivered Lanesha when Lanesha’s teenaged mother died in childbirth and who has cared for her all her life.

Ninth Ward contains some strong, tightly written scenes. Preparing for a lecture last year, I took a few of those scenes and marked up the dialogue and narrative to see how it played out, close up. I was struck by how spare the writing was, with no wasted words.

Here's a screenshot of one of the scenes I marked up, just to show what I mean. Most of the time, I'm a confirmed paper book lover but one of the benefits of reading a text in an e-book version is that you can do things like this.

The dialogue here is in yellow and the narrative beats in green. It's a great exercise and allows me to "feel" the patterns in a text. It's taught me to write scenes by backing into the balance my scenes might need, trying to feel it as I go, trying to make my deeply felt sense of my story show up in a certain kind of flow on the page.