But when it gets too much, and she hides in the bathroom, she thinks of Mama YaYa's words-"'You are loved, Lanesha,' she always says. Lanesha's suffered through a lot of teasing-crazy, spooky, and witch are some of the things she's called by the other kids.
Despite being as poor as can be money-wise, Mama YaYa given Lanesah a childhood that is just about the warmest, most tenderly-drawn fictional childhood I can think of. Mama Ya-Ya has raised Lanesha in world where ghosts are just one fact of life, and everything around them-magnolia flowers, birds, numbers-has a meaning that transcends the quotidian. Her Mama is just one of many ghost that Lanesha can see. Her ghost still lies there on the bed where, still and unresponsive, still waiting for her baby to be born safely into the world. Her seventeen-year old mother, rejected by her well off family after she became pregnant, died giving birth to her.but she hasn't quite left her daughter. Lanesha has lived all her twelve years in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans secure in the love of Mama Ya-Ya, the wise old woman who was the midwife at her birth. Ninth Ward, by Jewell Parker Rhodes (2010, Little Brown, middle grade on up, 217 pages) is a book that is just plain unequivocally Good, in its writing, its story, its characters, and even in the much more subjective territory of the feelings it left me with.
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