Sing, Unburied, Sing ★★★★☆

Sing, Unburied, Sing (Click Here To Buy)

★★★★☆

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward is the story of an interracial family told mostly from the perspectives of the son Jojo and the mother Leonie, as they drive across rural Mississippi to pick up the father, who is being released from prison.

I read this on my Kindle on loan from the library.

Telling the stories from such different perspectives - a 13 year old being raised mostly by his grandparents and being forced to mostly raise his 3 year old sister Kayla; and his mother, a meth user desperately in love and rarely around to take care of her children - creates a deeply layered narrative fraught with fractured family dynamics. The book additionally brings in an element of magic realism - Leonie sees her dead brother every time she gets high and Jojo sees a boy who was an inmate from when his grandfather was in prison. Ward combines these elements of family, death, race, illness, and intergenerational trauma in a text that reads with a poetic excellence.

Jesmyn Ward has written a number of other books, next on my TBR from her will be Salvage The Bones. Ward teaches at Tulane University, which is where I began my college education. #rollwave

If you liked Sing, Unburied, Sing, I also recommend The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones, and The Underground Railroad by Colston Whitehead.

Happy reading!

Ms.Bjork