MIAMI BOOK FAIR 17
KINCA
ID^
AN
D^ CORTÉSPHOTOS^ COURTESY^OF
THE^ AUT
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RST
here’s a storied history
behind Party: A Mystery
(Black Sheep/Akashic),
a new picture book
written by Jamaica
Kincaid and illustrated
by Ricardo Cortés. Kincaid originally
wrote Party as a piece for adults to
be published in the Talk of the Town
section of the New Yorker in 1980. The
literary inspiration for the piece, however, goes back much
further than that. In the New Yorker story, three girls attend a
party celebrating the publication of the Nancy Drew books.
“I loved the books as a child in Antigua and I even still collect
them today,” Kincaid says. “Anyway, the point was to write an
amusing piece about parties, and I used the characters from
the books, friends of Nancy.”
It would be many years before that story took on a whole
new and unexpected life as a children’s book. Typically, in
the world of children’s literature, it’s an author or pub-
lisher who first reaches out to an artist. In this case, after
illustrator Cortés discovered Kincaid’s story in Talk Stories,
a collection of her New Yorker pieces, he set the project
in motion. Kincaid credits Cortés with having the vision
to adapt the story to the new format. “The story in Party
is really Ricardo’s,” she says. “The way of imagining it as a
mystery that would interest a child is really his.”
The picture book follows the basic premise behind
Kincaid’s story: three girls—Pam, Beth, and Sue—attend a
party at the New York Public Library in celebration of the
Nancy Drew books. Amid the refreshments and flowers,
the girls spy something mysterious and unexpected that
readers may not necessarily see themselves. As in Kincaid’s
original story, the mystery in the picture book is never fully
explained, and much is left up to the reader’s imagination.
Kincaid believes that, in illustrating Party, Cortés only
enhanced the story’s enigma, providing a greater sense of
intrigue and playfulness likely to appeal to young readers.
She particularly praises Cortés’s conclusion. “[Cortés] cre-
ates an ending that is unusual,” she says. “We want things
to be all wrapped up so we can all go to bed and sleep. But I
believe he is saying that we can... dream also. Or we can sit
and wonder. I think he is saying, ‘What is there behind this
curtain: dare I look?’”
Kincaid, who was such a voracious reader as a child that,
she says, “I would even read the labels on boxes or tins of
cocoa,” believes it’s a misconception that children eschew
ambiguity in the books they read. “When I was a young
reader, I never wanted certainty in literature,” she says. “And
now that I am an old reader, I want it even less.”
For Cortés, it was precisely the story’s unanswered
questions that drew him to it. “I read it,” he says. “It con-
fused me, and I reread it immediately. It made me laugh, it
frustrated me, and it left me a bit bewildered. I loved it!” He
was struck by the story’s subversion of traditional mystery
story structures, which present a puzzle and then deliver a
solution. “Jamaica’s story grabbed my attention, and then
almost as quickly left me, quite ridiculously, without an
answer,” Cortés says. “What a strange tease! Perhaps itwas a play on the Nancy Drew template
referenced in the story, or maybe the author
simply wanted to stir up even more mystery
for her own amusement.”
Cortés liked the idea of creating a
children’s book that would challenge young
readers’ expectations and keep them guess-
ing long after reading. “I imagined a child
seeing a structure dismantled,” he says, “and
[thereby gaining] a new understanding of
how a story could be created.” Cortés says
that when he first reached out to Kincaid
with his idea to adapt the story, “she seemed
bemused at the idea of revisiting and refashioning the prose...
and she quite generously agreed to a collaboration.”
So what actually is the nature of the “mystery” in the story?
For Cortés, the not knowing is precisely the point. “The mystery
of this book is a mystery itself, right?” he says. “That does so
amuse me, and I certainly didn’t want to ruin any interpretations
by pressing the reader with my own suspicions of its nature.” As
much as Cortés loves the story’s ambiguity, he says it “created
an extraordinary challenge: telling a story simply through the
emotions and expressions of the three main characters.”
The images of the children in the book are based on three
sisters he knows, Cortés says. “They were quite patient with
me as I tried, over several visits, to give them direction so
I might capture certain expressions.” For Kincaid, Cortés’s
characters—three girls of color—bring an entirely new
dimension to the story. “I love Ricardo’s rendition of those
girls,” she says. “They seem so self-possessed and bold and
not afraid of what they would find at the end of any journey
they have embarked on.”
Cortés feels that the story’s open-endedness has an added
benefit—readers can interpret the circumstances as they’d
like. “I’ve been privy to many explanations from children
to whom I’ve read the book,” he says. “It’s quite fun to hear
them, and I’ve been genuinely impressed.”ON PARTY: A MYSTERY
Saturday, Nov. 23, 2 p.m.
Wembly’s Author Tent“I love
Ricardo’s
rendition of
those girls.
They seem
so self-
possessed
and bold and
not afraid
of what they
would find
at the end of
any journey
they have
embarked
on.”Ricardo Cortés