How to Manage a Large Cast of Characters: An Analysis of The Thirteenth Child

The Thirteenth Child[1]. It’s a wonderful title, one that will have most readers wondering about such a child, and what it means to be the thirteenth, and whether they will be unlucky. It will have most authors wondering whether this novel could really contain a cast of thirteen characters. As a matter of fact, our main character, Eff, comes from a family of fourteen. She is the unlucky thirteenth child, and her twin brother, Lan, is number fourteen, the seventh son of a seventh son, and therefore a natural-born wizard.

This is the delightful setup Patricia Wrede uses to craft a unique and rich story of a girl who must learn to navigate the negative societal expectations for a thirteenth child contrasted with the high hopes of good fortune society sets upon her twin. Unfortunately, this setup also necessitates a much larger cast of characters than an author would usually choose to undertake. But Patricia Wrede is a master. I hope to use this blog post to tease apart her seemingly effortless handling of such a large cast of characters so that we can all put it to good use in our own writings.

After extensive analysis, I’ve found Wrede uses three main tactics to manage her unwieldy secondary characters; she groups them together, she gives individuals one or two outstanding characteristics to set them apart, and she uses first-person point of view to narrow the scope of their personalities to the main character’s perception of them.

The Power of Groups

One of the simplest ways to handle many unimportant characters is to group them together and treat them as one. Wrede does this right away with the elder half of Eff’s siblings; when Eff introduces them, she says, “I hardly knew my oldest brothers and sisters. . . . They felt more like strange grown-ups I had to be polite to than like family” (12). Immediately we know that they’re not going to be important to the story, because they’re not important to Eff, and we think of them as a unit, because Eff does. Wrede has essentially cut her family of fourteen in half.

Eff’s aunts, uncles, and cousins get a similar treatment. Eff usually refers to them as a group, and even if she calls them out individually, they all have similar views and reactions. When poor Eff is getting bullied by her village and her family, she says, “My cousins were the worst, mainly because there were so many of them.…But even the children who weren’t relatives took their cue from my cousins” (3). When all the family gathers to prepare for a wedding, the unimportant characters are grouped together and dismissed as one; “The uncles weren’t around much, only the aunts and girl cousins, and all of them were so busy with wedding plans that they hardly had time to think of me at all” (147).

Wrede doesn’t always dismiss her groups. When the aunts learn Eff’s sister Rennie has eloped, Wrede uses their individual reactions to create a sense of chaos in the scene. Notice, however, that the overall tone of each reaction does not differ, and therefore, they are still being treated as though they were one character:

Aunt Mari thought that Rennie should be formally read out of the family and never spoken of again, thought she certainly spoke plenty about Rennie every chance she got. Aunt Janna said it was a family disgrace, and just what you’d expect from bringing a girl up out in the Western borderland, especially when there was family history. She only said that once, because Aunt Tilly threw her out of the house for “raking up the dead past.” Aunt Ellen pointed out that Rennie was only twenty, so Papa could have the marriage declared void. Several of the other aunts thought he should do just that. (151)

This is an effective tactic for creating a hubbub, yet it doesn’t bog down the story or overwhelm the reader, because all the aunts are reacting the same way.

Outstanding Characteristics

Of course, not all secondary characters should be compressed into one or get shuttled off into the background. Wrede makes sure that the characters who will have a slightly greater role than background work are distinguishable throughout the book by giving them one or two outstanding characteristics. Rennie, for example, is always either sulky or bossy: When Eff’s parents announced that the family is moving at the beginning of the novel, “Rennie. . .seemed to feel abandoned or hurt that Mama and Papa would even consider muddling up [her] life like this” (15). When it was time to board the train, “Rennie pouted and said she wished she’d stayed with Uncle Stephen after all” (24). When Mama needed to leave the home for a few days, Eff complains that Rennie “started bossing the rest of us mercilessly, like she wanted to prove that she could handle the householding better than mama. She even tried to boss Mrs. Callahan” (44). Every time Rennie is mentioned, one of her outstanding characteristics is mentioned as well, cementing her in the reader’s mind even before she becomes important to the story.

Eff’s Uncle Earl and Aunt Janna represent the discomfort all of Eff’s extended family feels toward her, but they are individual in their vehemence. They are given a powerful introduction when Eff explains, “Uncle Earn and Aunt Janna. . . .said Mama and Papa ought to have drowned me as soon as Lan was safely born, and it wasn’t too late yet if they just had the resolution” (4). Not once are they mentioned without a demonstration of their prejudiced views. Granted, Uncle Earl did try to get Eff arrested when she was four, and that ought to make him pretty memorable, but since he and Aunt Janna aren’t in the next few chapters after that, Wrede makes sure they stick out from the passel of external family when they are reintroduced:

Uncle Stephen gave me a sidelong look that made Mama frown.

“There was some talk of having Eff stay with you, but Janna felt it would be safer to keep her away from the center of the wedding preparations.”. . .

“Janna,” Mama said, like she’d just found a next of spiders in a kitchen cupboard. “I might have known she and Earn would come up with something like this. And don’t tell me he wasn’t in on it, for I won’t believe you. Janna does whatever her husband wants, and he’s never gotten over having a thirteenth child in the family.” (144)

Since this follows a long list of different aunts and uncles who are taking in the members of Eff’s immediate family for the wedding, it is an especially helpful reminder of who the antagonists are.

Perspective

The Thirteenth Child is a first-person narrative, written from the point of view of our darling narrator, Eff, and this is the most effective means Wrede uses to manage her cast of characters. First of all, Eff is a child, and she sees the world with childlike innocence; to her, Uncle Earn is always evil, Rennie is always bossy, and her brothers Robbie and Jack are always annoying. Wrede doesn’t have to write a host of complex characters because Eff’s perception of them is simple. On top of that, Eff is an introvert. She focuses her time and attention on only a few people, so Wrede only needs to develop a few characters. This tactic may work just as well with third-person limited.

In Conclusion . . .

The Thirteenth Child is a remarkable book, and not just for its large cast of secondary characters. Patricia Wrede has developed a fun, fascinating world,  interweaving magic creatures, cultures, and childhoods in a revisionist history of early America. Her main characters are well-developed, and it is interesting to watch them mature throughout the course of the book. I highly recommend you pick it up from your local bookstore or library, and, if you happen to be an aspiring author, take a close look for the strategies I have mentioned here. See if you can find more examples of them in the book, and then employ them in your own stories. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

[1] Patricia C. Wrede, The Thirteenth Child (New York: Scholastic Press, 2009).