Ninth Ward
Series: The Louisiana Girls, Book 1
By: Jewell Parker Rhodes / Narrated By: Sisi Aisha Johnson
Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
Decent, but not the best, middle-grade fiction about Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans
I’ve gotta say that I enjoyed Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere by Julie T. Lamana (Which I’ll review for the anniversary of Katrina’s landfall in Louisiana/Mississippi) much more than I did this, Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes. I’d just finished listening to this author’s Towers Falling about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and was quite moved by it (Despite Rhodes’s questionable narration). So NATurally I did what I usually do when I’m moved by a book: I dashed over to my trusty laptop and looked for other works by the author. And when I found this audiobook, coming close to the arrival of Tropical Storm Barry with his threats of MAJOR flooding to New Orleans? I bought the bejesus outta it.
Twelve-year old Lanesha is our heroine for this jaunt into the flooding caused by the failing of the levees after Hurricane Katrina strikes. She’s an orphan living with Mama Ya-Ya, an old midwife, the one who birthed her, and her childhood, even as an orphan not claimed by relatives, she lives a life filled with the love of the old woman. She’s not accepted by most of her child peers as she is dark but has unusually light green eyes. Plus, how to put this: She sees ghosts. She sees the ghost of her mother upstairs in the bed where her mother died, at age seventeen, during childbirth; she sees the ghosts of those cut down by gang violence.
I was a trifle disappointed because I thought there was going to be a greater element of the unknown, the unseen-by-us, that Lanesha’s world would be peopled by all these ghosts, giving us, the listeners, a unique look at the Ninth Ward, a look at perhaps New Orleans itself. But alas. They’re only a hint here, a hint there. Mostly it’s about the relationship between Lanesha and her world in the neighborhood, her world with Mama Ya-Ya—which is a world of acceptance. So there’s not much about her being an outcast either, which is something that usually makes for good fiction.
Then too there’s the fact that there’s not much about the trials and tribulations suffered after Katrina and the flooding, so there’s not that much tension going on in the story on that front either. It all ends rather abruptly which was disappointing there too.
Sisi Aisha Johnson, who totally ROCKED One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, turns in an earnest yet somehow lackluster performance here. It’s as though she’s just trying too hard for power and emotion where power and emotion is what’s lacking in the text. I will say this, however: She sounds NOTHING like she did in the One Crazy Summer Series—her characters are very, very much distinct and don’t sound like anything she’s done before which is quite a feat for a narrator. And I do respect the hell outta that! Still, her performance wasn’t enough to draw me in, to make me feel a bond with the characters.
I dunno. Maybe had I NOT listened to Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere I’d have liked this more. But perhaps not. Lanesha seems INCREDIBLY childlike for a girl of twelve, and I just can’t feel much for a girl so sheltered, so ignorant of the world around her. It seemed as though she was always dashing off to look things up in the encyclopedias Mama Ya-Ya worked so hard to provide for her, and that’s not something I can respect. I can respect a person wanting to know what something is; I can’t respect someone who obviously hasn’t been listening to classes at school. I mean, what on earth are they teaching her since she doesn’t know what basic words are (And I’m assuming Parker Rhodes kept having her looking words up so that Lanesha can roll the words around on her tongue, give her a chance to savor them in what is supposed to be a charming literary manner?).
If you have only one credit to use, and you’re looking for a youngster’s take on life in the aftermath of Katrina, this audiobook isn’t it. Charming, kinda sorta, but there are much better out there… At least one I can think of offhand…!
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