Sing, Unburied, Sing
Ratings152
Average rating4.1
Definitely paying homage to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Morrison's Song of Solomon. Ward is not up to the level of those two, but that's like saying I'm not as good a football coach as Bill Walsh. No duh.
I am not going to rate this book.
I am grappling with this book and it is challenging me. With that in mind, no rating will suffice.
This is one of those instances where I recognize how well-written a book is, yet I just do not enjoy it. This novel is complex and heartbreaking with beautiful language. However, the subject matter and use magical realism just do not work for me in this instance.
The story is narrated mostly by Leonie and her son, Jojo as they take a trip to Parchman prison to retrieve their husband/father who is being released. The story also reveals the tale of Jojo's grandfather's time in Parchman and a tragic experience that occurred there. The plot delves into topics of drug addiction, race, guilt, family dysfunction, and death.
The main reason this book does not work for me is the main female character, Leonie. She is a drug addict who neglects her children, and I cannot bring myself to feel any sympathy for her. Another reason for the lower rating is the magical realism of the book. When the ghost aspects of the plot come into play, it feels like too much and changes the direction of the book. For me, the story begins to lack cohesion.
Overall, I can appreciate that this story is beautifully written and tragic. It just does not work for me.
So haunting and deeply sad. This book explores race and racism, injustice, family, connection, poverty, death, drugs, and spirits. It's heavy but beautiful. Ripped my heart out.
I could tell you the plot, about 13 year old Jojo and her 3 year old sister Kayla accompanying their indifferent and often high mother Leonie to Parchman Penitentiary to pick up their father Michael from jail. About his racist (white) parents as well as Leonie's folks, her mother wasting away from cancer and her father, whom Jojo idolizes, still working the little patch of land in Bois Sauvage on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
Leonie is haunted by the ghost of her brother Given. Yes haunted as in Given shows up silently whenever she gets high. Jojo picks up his own ghost at the prison. Richie we find has a tragic history with Jojo's grandfather. Maybe it's a story of generational trauma, of the low thrum of lingering pain paired with the keen awareness of black bodies dead and discarded by a white system.
Maybe, but what is certain is the pure poetic song of Jesmyn Ward's writing that is just gorgeous. Honeyed words burnishing a horrific history. Another incredible read.
Dang. This one socked me hard. I'm still reeling. Trying to sleep after reading this book, especially towards the end, is like trying to sleep with a rock lodged in your throat: heavy and full and sad, and demanding your attention to the heaviness, the fullness, the sadness. The language is wonderfully poetic, the story painfully tragic, and the crescendo of magical realism (if that's what you'd call it?) is downright powerful. It feels at once historical and contemporary in a way that's especially poignant at this moment. It reminds me of Toni Morrison, but not in way that feels derivative. A good book, through and through – but the kind I need to recover from.
Monsters walk among us, and we humans really need to figure out what to do about them. (I don't know if that's Ward's message; it's just what hit me hardest in this book). I know it's not their fault – know that they're just broken – but they're monsters nonetheless and their actions inflict such tragic costs. Can't we all agree that it would be cheaper better healthier saner, more humane for everyone, to find ways to recognize and treat the problem?
This book really moved me. I felt rage, grief, wonder, admiration, love, and hope, strongly correlated with each distinct character, and I guess that sounds like they're onedimensional but they're not: they're human, deep, all of them, just each one feeding their inner wolves differently. Ward writes beautifully, and pulls off a neat trick: shifting first-person narration between three radically different main characters, each with a unique and credible voice. This doesn't alter the reader's sympathies - I don't think Ward was trying for that - but it does add an extra dimension (no pun intended) to the reader's experience.
How I'd love to see a day when a book like this is incomprehensible to a reader.
Most of this book happens in the last 25 pages. The contrast between Jojo, Richie, and Leonie's perspectives, language, and worldview is distinct yet similarly poignant. I think I'm on the fence with this one. The writing is excellent, specifically the descriptions of feelings towards each other and the way the author describes the visceral intricacies of being black in white spaces. I'm not going to lie though, the plot is meh, the characters aren't super likable, and I have a lot of questions, but I still liked it.
Luminous prose. Characters so intricately constructed. Vivid and beautiful and heartbreaking. I really loved this book.
Summary: Sin begets sin, systems feed on those around them, history matters to the present.
Sing, Unburied, Sing deserves its praise. This is not a genre that I traditionally read. If it involves ghosts, I probably have not read it. I tend toward fiction that is more oriented toward fantasy, science fiction or mystery in general. But ghosts here make a lot of sense. They bring history into the discussion of the black experience.
I realized with The Darkest Child that part of what makes Black fiction powerful and often difficult to read in its tragedy is its embrace of the cascading nature of sin. Sin begets sin so that there is often the choice only between whom the harm is going to hurt.
Sing, Unburied, Sing follow several different narrators. Jojo is a 13 year old trying to be a man. The primary caregiver of his toddler aged sister, he is being raised primarily by his grandfather, Pop. His grandmother is dying. His father is in jail. His (White) grandfather refuses to acknowledge his existence. His uncle was killed by his (White) father's cousin. His mother, Leonie, is trying to do what she can, but she also escapes into drugs.
The main story is a few days around the drive to go pick up Michael, Jojo's father, from prison, the same prison his grandfather was in as a teen. There are two ghosts, another 13 year old boy who was in prison with Pop, and Given, Jojo's uncle. I will not reveal more than that.
Jesmyn Ward is a beautifully poetic writer. There is a slow building. I listened to the audiobook from the library and the different characters have different narrators and all were read expertly. The book is beautifully written, and the narrators really give those words life.
Deeply haunting. A read that is both profoundly unique and universal. Slight supernatural elements that weren't the focal point of the story or obnoxious. Imagery for engraining.
Often while I was reading Sing, Unburied, Sing, I had to hush my inner critic. Yes, Jesmyn Ward weaves some wonderful scenes and vivid sentences, but she really isn't doing anything new. Yes, that climax is gut-wrenchingly affective, but it really isn't anything that hasn't been done before. It's almost too easy to dismiss Sing, Unburied, Sing as just another book about a tormented family surviving racial injustice in the South, a setting that tends to invite ghosts (of which there are plenty here.) It's easy to say that the narrative is nothing original and that the conclusion was powerful, but trite. Yes, I can just say, Jesmyn Ward isn't doing anything new—she's just carrying on the various traditions of Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, John Steinbeck... Or I can say, “Damn, Jesmyn Ward is carrying on the tradition of Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison...John Steinbeck, and she's doing a fabulous job of it!”
This is a beautiful, sorrowful, devastating read. And that last page... wow. The imagery was haunting and the characters vivid and real.
This is not my genre, my girlfriend, who never rates books, told me this was 5/5 for her. She has different tastes in books than me. I am more hard sci-fi or science-related non-fiction. She appreciates the fiction that takes place early or pre 1900's and has to do with drugs or has a spiritual bend to it. This book covers all over her pre-requisites.
I will say I appreciated the story. It's about a family dealing with death, drugs, vague spiritual powers that they don't really discuss, prison, being black in the early 1900s (?). I like that they jumped perspective a lot. The son, the mom, the spirits, the grandparents.
That said I tended to skim some parts that got a bit confusing. Multiple characters talk at once, but only one character can hear one of them and also the dialect and accents are hard to read but I believe that is just period appropriate.
I would recommend this book, especially if this is the genre you gravitate towards.
In what is most definitely an unpopular opinion, I found “Sing, Unburied, Sing” just not very good. Usually, I really enjoy National Book Award recipients more.
For some time, I have noticed this book in the book club section at my library, where I often go if no other inspiration strikes. Yet (and this is a horrible confession to make), the title kept turning me off because it seemed overly pretentious. A few months ago, one of the members of my Great Books Book Club recommended the Now Read This Book Club, a partnership between NPR and the New York Times. I had already read one of the books and several others looked really interesting, so I thought I'd give the book a chance.
The content (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/now-read-this/#sing-unburied-sing) includes a long-form interview, where we travel around the small town in Mississippi where Jesmyn grew up and also discuss her inspirations (from Faulkner to her brother, killed at age 19). In particular, Ms. Ward talks about wanting to write because there were never girls of color among the plucky heroines like Anne of Green Gables or Pippi Longstocking or Harriet the Spy (all major influences on me, as well).
What shined through in this book is Ms. Ward's ability to describe her local world and the people. The first chapter was really well-written; in it, 12-year old Jojo and his grandfather, Pop, kill a goat in preparation for Jojo's birthday meal. I felt like I was right there with these two generations, one stepping into manhood and one teaching the other what it means to be a man. We are also introduced to toddler Kayla (who seemed more like a 2-year-old than a 3-year-old) and Mam, Jojo's dying grandmother. We also first hear about 12-year-old Richie, who was imprisoned at Parchman with Pop about 40 years before the main action of the book. The continuing sections about the prison were particularly affecting and accurate if you've ever known anyone who has been in prison. When Jojo is handcuffed and pushed to the ground during an aggressive traffic stop, the reader feels how horrific it is to be a person of color in today's America, unable to speak up and ask for justice when no wrong has been committed.
What also stuck out to me almost within the second page is the lack of a consistent voice for any character. Jojo occasionally speaks using local dialect, but at other times speaks with perfect grammar. This is true of both Richie and Leonie, the other two narrators. I wish that Ms. Ward had made the focus Jojo and Richie and targeted the book at younger audiences to add a young, strong person of color to the reading palette.
There have been comparisons to Faulkner's “As I Lay Dying,” which is the ultimate dysfunctional family road trip. While we are in Mississippi, I don't really see the parallels. Faulkner captured the voices of local people in a way that Ms. Ward has not yet developed.
It is in the sections narrated by Leonie that I think the book is most unsuccessful; while the sections in which her spiritual and earthy mother speak through Leonie's memories are beautiful, I didn't feel like we got deep enough into Leonie herself. Are we supposed to believe that she's super cool with having a relationship (and, eventually, kids) with the child of the man who deemed her brother's murder a hunting accident? Or, is this choice, like the choice to sink into drugs, the way to escape her inability to be like either of her parents or to get over Given's death? Are we really to believe that Leonie is so overcome by grief and drugs that she has no interest in her vomiting child, but is consumed by attention to Michael? Even before he returned, she was barely around for the kids and it is clear at the end of the book that she is completely gone.
Some of the magical realism totally made sense to me and the ghosts didn't bother me like some other readers. But some of it, like Mam's death scene, was overly dramatic and stupid. As much as I liked the flashbacks of Mam, I found that scene to be forced.
After finishing the book, I'm afraid that my initial turn-off about the title was right; there was a lot of pretension and I found the writing less poetic and more stilted (despite some sections that were very good). I do want to check out her other books because it's clearly Jesmyn Ward is filling a gap in literature and telling the stories of those who we don't hear enough from - I just hope she lets her characters sing.
I know, I'm late to the party. This book made a big splash back in September - everyone was talking about it, and it won the National Book Award. My library, however, did not have enough copies to go around, and I was late putting a hold on it, so the hold I put on it in January finally came around to my turn!
In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward returns to the same neighborhood in Mississippi that Salvage the Bones was written about. (Two of the siblings from Salvage the Bones show up in a scene in Sing.) The story is told from three different viewpoints: Jojo, a thirteen-year-old boy and the main character of the novel, Leonie, his drug-addicted mother, and Richie, the ghost of a boy Jojo's grandfather met in prison.
This book covers so much that it's difficult to categorize - between discrimination and outright bigotry, bi-racial romance and children, drug addiction, poverty, prison life - deep south gothic, I suppose, would be the best description. Sing really only takes place over a couple of days, but it feels much longer, because Jojo's grandfather tells stories of his time in prison decades prior, Leonie reminisces about high school, and there's just this sense of timelessness over the entire novel.
It's not an easy book. These are hard issues to grapple with, and too many people have to live with these issues. Poverty, bigotry, addiction - these things disproportionately affect the black community, and white people are to blame for the imbalance.
I'm not sure how I feel about the ghost aspect of the book; on one hand I feel like people will see the ghost and decide the book is fantasy - that they don't really need to care about the problems the family faces. On the other hand, the ghost allows us to see even more bigotry and inhumanity targeted at black people. So it serves a purpose.
I'm not sure I like this book. But I'm glad I read it. And that's pretty much going to be my recommendation; it's not a fun read, but it's an important one.
You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.
A page turner that is incredibly difficult to get through. The writing is raw and real - with few glimpses of hope and happiness. While predictable at times - this does not take away from the work at all. While you might say I lack a thick skin for saying this - I read this over the course of 2 days - and I found this to be so dark that I could only handle it in doses. I heard so many good things about this book that I was so glad to give it a chance.
The writing is gorgeous!
The characters and parts of the story are common tropes. There is some magic realism that adds a new angle to the story. But mostly, the writing is gorgeous!!
It is hard to find the words to do this novel justice. So many elements come into play, but it breaks down to really, really good writing, and characters that become unforgettable. Don't let the magical realism scare you off - that is not my wheelhouse, but in this novel it feels seamless. A heartbreaking novel by a new American master.
I don't think that I can write a review that will ever do this book justice. It was so beautiful and so sad. Just, so sad.
The part where Pop tells the end of Richie's story is some of the best writing I've ever read. Amazing novel.
A story about a family struggling with the racial injustice of the South, crime and poverty, and the close presence of ghosts and demons of the past. Told from 3 different viewpoints, Ward's writing is lyrical and powerful, yet at the same time makes it sometimes hard to follow. Maybe I needed to spend more time with the characters, but besides Jojo and Kayla, I don't feel like I attached to them. Plus it took me a while to accept that a surprisingly big part of the plot was dedicated to beings from the astral plane :)
3.5