Ruined: A Novel Individual Text Feature

The book that I will do my final research paper on is Ruined: A Novel by Paula Morris. I read the book when I was in high school and it became an important book to me because it is the first book I ever randomly picked up from the teen section of the bookstore that included the realities of race relations in the past. Reading the book made me realize that diversity was missing from my readings and the bookstore. The book fearlessly and naturally mentions situations particular to the New Orleans black community and race in general. Because this book is marketed toward the mainstream teen demographic, it allows them to create sympathy and learn facts about the past that do not frequently appear in mainstream teen literature.

The book is about a sixteen-year-old girl named Rebecca who moved to New Orleans to stay with her aunt while her dad was on a business trip to China. While there, she encounters Helena Bowman and her mean group of friends who dislike her immediately. Because she is intrigued by and wants to be accepted with the group, she follows them when they go to hang out in one of New Orleans infamous cemeteries. There she meets a black girl named Lisette who turns out to be a ghost. She and Lisette become great friends and eventually, Lisette tells Rebecca that she was murdered by the wife of her father: A rich white man.

The author uses Lisette’s story about her death as a way to present facts about the way New Orleans was in the 1850s. New Orleans had a unique class structure that included the slaves, free black people, the mulattos, and the whites at the time. Lisette was considered a mulatto. The author writes about Lisette’s lack of acceptance by the slaves and their distrust of her and freed colored people and she also writes about the terrible treatment Lisette received as she was sent to work at the Bowman’s home. When Lisette guides Rebecca through the spirit world she speaks about the ghosts that are still racist even in death because they are just frozen in the state they were in when they died. For a book about a young white girl, the author focuses a lot on race and the history of race in New Orleans. By entwining race in a story like this so completely the author forces the reader to not only confront the wrongs committed by white people but also to feel sympathy for Lisette. Often literature shies away from accurate facts about race relations and distances the reader from the consequences of it. Ruined does not.

After Lissette tells Rebecca that she was murdered by the wife of her father. The reader learns of the curse that Lisette’s mother puts on the Bowman family. Every daughter dies before their seventeenth birthday. We also learn that Rebecca’s mother died creating the Curse and that Mrs. Bowman never receives punishment for her crime because she claims that Lisette dies of the Yellow Fever epidemic and all the witnesses corroborate her story. We also learn the Rebecca is, in fact, a Bowman and her parents left New Orleans to escape the curse. Because of that either she and Helena Bowman have to die to break the curse that Lisette’s mother put on the Bowman’s.

The inevitable ending of either Rebecca or Helena dying shows that the author is not afraid to give consequences to the white characters in the book who harm the minorities. Even though Rebecca is a descendant of the Bowman’s and she befriends Lisette the curse does not lift and the family is still punished. It is not common for mainstream literature to allow minority characters to get painless retribution for the wrongs they endure. When the curse is lifted by Helena dying, Rebecca gets to move on to the afterlife in peace. Even though her mom dies forming the curse the author mentions that she is accepted death because she had nothing else to live for without her daughter.

The author draws parallels between Lisette and Rebecca using liminality. While Rebecca is unaccepted by her classmates and feels disconnected with New Orleans, Lisette is a ghost living in between life and death who just wants to move on. Drawing the parallels between the two characters creates an environment that makes it easier to for a reader that would not normally relate to Lisette to be able to sympathize with her. In addition, the author makes Rebecca outright sympathize with her to create a feel in the text that makes it almost impossible not to feel bad for Lisette and resent Mrs. Bowman.

Unfortunately, much of the book’s easy confrontation of racial subjects is caused by the fact that the author is not of American descent. She is from New Zealand, therefore, she can look at the subject of race relations in North America’s past objectively. In addition, she is a white woman. I would argue that it would be much more difficult for a black author to get a book like this published and even more difficult to get it on mainstream bookstore shelves. Still, this book does great work in allowing a nonminority reader to be confronted with historical racism and its realities.

In conclusion, Paula Morris’s book Ruined: A Novel is an important one in the field of young adult literature because it allows nonminority readers to sympathize with a minority character and learn a more accurate history of minorities.