Ninth Ward

Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Little, Brown, 2010) is dedicated to "all the children who experienced Hurricane Katrina and the levees breaking in New Orleans." Five years ago today.

The book itself is a coming-of-age story, with realistic and fantastical elements in equal measure.  Twelve-year-old narrator Lanesha and her Mama Ya-Ya can see ghosts, including the ghost of Lanesha's mother, who died birthing her.  And Mama Ya-Ya can see the future.  That future, of course, includes the hurricane and its aftermath--events that will test Lanesha and over which she must find a way to triumph.

Rhodes gives Lanesha a lovely voice, and for the first several chapters (the calm before the storm), all is well in the Ninth Ward.  Lanesha is a bright girl who loves words and wants to be an engineer.  She has a close, loving relationship with Mama Ya-Ya; a supportive teacher at her new middle school; a strong community of neighbors and shopkeepers and even, for the first time, friends her own age (Ginia and TaShon).  I loved this part of the book and wanted it to go on, for Lanesha's sake, even though I knew full well the storm was coming.

When it does, Lanesha must cope with the realization that Mama Ya-Ya, already old, is losing strength as rapidly as the storm is gaining it.  Now Lanesha has to rely on her own fortitude (one of her vocabulary words, meaning "strength to endure") to get herself and TaShon through the storm.

A note about the ghosts:  Mama Ya-Ya, and especially Lanesha, see ghosts throughout the book.  The ghosts are usually in the background, and I almost took their presence for granted (this is New Orleans, after all).  Ninth Ward just doesn't feel like a ghost story or a fantasy novel.  Maybe it's magical realism?

[See the author's website for resources related to Ninth Ward.]

The Shadows

The painting of the forest at night featured in last week's Middle Grade Gallery comes from Jacqueline West's debut novel, The Shadows (Volume 1 of The Books of Elsewhere; Dial, 2010).  It's one of several paintings--landscapes, portraits, genre scenes of stonemasons and laughing girls-- in the old house on Linden Street that serve as portals into a mysterious Elsewhere.

Enter Olive Dunwoody, the eleven-year-old daughter of two abstracted math professors who have just bought the house and its contents.  Olive, lonely and left to her own devices most of the time, senses almost immediately that the house is keeping secrets.  With the help of a pair of spectacles, three talking house cats (Horatio, the gigantic orange one, is my favorite) and her own determination to solve the mystery of the paintings and the people in them, she travels into--and out of--Elsewhere.  But if she's not careful, she may get trapped in a painting before she can stop the dark forces who created them...and live in them still.

I absolutely adored this book.  Starting with Olive, who's an extremely likable heroine--shy and awkward, but also imaginative, curious, and brave (lots of bookish girls will recognize themselves in her); her relationships with her parents, who are present if not exactly paying attention; and with Morton, a small annoying boy who's been trapped in a painting for a long time himself.  Plus the cats!

Then there's the house.  Who can resist an old stone Victorian, full of antique furniture and strange knicknacks?  Not I.  It's got an attic heaped with things, too; not to mention an overgrown garden that I hope Olive explores more thoroughly in one of the later books in the series.

Most of all, though, I love the mystery, and the mechanics, of The Shadows.  The paintings aren't just portals between the house and Elsewhere, they are Elsewhere.  The people there are mostly paintings, too--the scenes where Olive realizes this about Morton, and then later when he realizes it about himself, are especially memorable.  [For what this might look like, check out Alexa Meade's acrylics on flesh.]

A note about the book itself:  If I were to write a middle grade fantasy novel, I would want it to be as beautifully made (let alone written) as this one.  Poly Bernatene's black-and-white illustrations are fantastic, a perfect fit for the creepy/comic tone of the text; the endpapers, printed with empty frames, are the exact same shade of blue as the sky on the jacket; there's even a debossed pair of spectacles on the hardcover underneath.  It's all very satisfying.

The Shadows has been compared to Coraline, but really, I liked it even better.  Highly recommended!

[Review copy received from publisher at ALA; thank you so much!]

Middle Grade Gallery III

This week in the Middle Grade Gallery, a painting (one of several) from a brand-new novel I absolutely adore and can't wait to review.  In the tradition of paintings like the one of the Narnian ship at sea, it's a portal to another, mysterious place. 

It was a painting of a forest at night.  The twigs of leafless trees made a black web against the sky.  A full moon pressed its face through the clouds, touching a path of white stones that led into the dark woods and disappeared.  But it seemed to [her] that somewhere, maybe just at the end of that white path, maybe in the darkness where the moonlight couldn't reach--there was something else within that painting.  Something she could almost see.

[Me again.]  Okay, so there are no trees in Andrew Wyeth's Snow Flurries, 1953 (NGA).  There is the suggestion of a white path, though, and of something else....

I'll reveal (and review) the source of this description next week.  In the meantime, please comment if you can recall any other portal paintings in middle grade novels, so I can add them to my collection.  Thanks!

[The review is here.]

Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Congratulations to Charlotte of Charlotte's Library and Jennifer of Jean Little Library, who correctly identified the source of last month's featured work of art in the Middle Grade Gallery:  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis.  The rest of you just weren't trying!  It is of course the picture of a Narnian ship at sea that hangs in a back room at Aunt Alberta's (I've always wondered who gave it to her) and becomes a portal into Narnia--or more precisely, into the Narnian sea--for Lucy, Edmund, and their horrible cousin Eustace.  I love this scene in the book and have been very curious about how it will look in the movie (due out December 10); fortunately, it's featured prominently in the trailer.

In the book, the children notice that the things in the picture are moving (Lewis notes that "it didn't look at all like a cinema, either"); then there's wind and noise and a wild, briny smell; finally, "a great, cold salt splash [breaks] right out of the frame." Then the children grow smaller or the picture grows bigger (it's not clear which), and they're all drawn down into the sea.  Here's the trailer for comparison:

What do you think?  Does this scene look as you had imagined it?