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Summary
Summary
*WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for FICTION
*A TIME MAGAZINE BEST NOVEL OF THE YEAR and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 OF 2017
*Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
*Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
*Finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize
*Publishers Weekly Top 10 of 2017
*Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a "tour de force" ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.
In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones , this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi's past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power--and limitations--of family bonds.
Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn't lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won't acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.
His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister's lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children's father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.
When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.
Rich with Ward's distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an unforgettable family story.
Author Notes
Jesmyn Ward was born in DeLisle, Mississippi in 1977. She became a writer after the death of her brother by a drunk driver. She received a MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Her books include the novel Where the Line Bleeds, the memoir Men We Reaped, and the nonfiction work The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race. Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award in Fiction in 2011 and an Alex Award in 2012. Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award in Fiction in 2017. She taught at University of New Orleans, the University of South Alabama, and Tulane University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ward (Salvage the Bones) tells the story of three generations of a struggling Mississippi family in this astonishing novel. "We don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once." This is the explanation 13-year-old Jojo is provided by his grandmother, the family matriarch, on her deathbed. "I'll be on the other side of the door," she reassures him, "With everybody else that's gone before." Jojo and his little sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, while Leonie, their mother, drifts in and out of their lives, causing chaos. Snorting coke one night, Leonie explains, "A clean burning shot through my bones, and then I forgot. The shoes I didn't buy, the melted cake..." Leonie wants to be a better mother, and when Jojo's and Kayla's father is released from prison, Leonie takes the kids with her, hoping for a loving reunion, but what she gets instead is a harrowing drive across a muggy landscape haunted by hatred. Throughout the novel, though, are beautifully crafted moments of tenderness. When the dead, including Leonie's murdered brother, make their appearances and their demands, no one in the family's surprised. But their stories are deeply affecting, in no small part because of Ward's brilliant writing and compassionate eye. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The terrible beauty of life along the nation's lower margins is summoned in this bold, bright, and sharp-eyed road novel.In present-day Mississippi, citizens of all colors struggle much as their ancestors did against the persistence of poverty, the wages of sin, and the legacy of violence. Thirteen-year-old Jojo is a sensitive African-American boy living with his grandparents and his toddler sister, Kayla, somewhere along the Gulf Coast. Their mother, Leonie, is addicted to drugs and haunted by visions of her late brother, Given, a local football hero shot to death years before by a white youth offended at being bested in some supposedly friendly competition. Somehow, Leonie ends up marrying Michael, the shooter's cousin, who worked as a welder on the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The novel's main story involves a road trip northward to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, where Michael's about to be released from prison. Leonie, very much a hot mess, insists on taking both children along to pick up their father even though it's clear from the start that Jojowho's more nurturing to his sister than their mother isin no way wants to make the journey, especially with his grandmother dying from cancer. Along the way, Jojo finds he's the only one who sees and speaks to another spirit: Richie, an ill-fated friend of his grandfather's who decades before was imprisoned at a brutal work camp when he was slightly younger than Jojo. Ward, a National Book Award winner for Salvage the Bones, (2011), has intimate knowledge of the Gulf Coast and its cultural complexities and recounts this jolting odyssey through the first-person voices of Jojo, Leonie, and occasionally Richie. They each evoke the swampy contours of the scenery but also the sweat, stickiness, and battered nerves that go along with a road trip. It's a risky conceit, and Ward has to work to avoid making her narrators sound too much like poets. But any qualms are overpowered by the book's intensely evocative imagery, musical rhetoric, and bountiful sympathy toward even the most exasperating of its characters. Remorse stalks the grown-ups like a search party, but grace in whatever form seems ready to salve their wounds, even the ones that don't easily show. As with the best and most meaningful American fiction these days, old truths are recast here in new realities rife with both peril and promise. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Jojo, 13, and his 3-year-old sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, while their mother, Leonie, struggles with drug addiction and her failures as a daughter, mother, and inheritor of a gift (or curse) that connects her to spirits. Leonie insists that Jojo and Kayla accompany her on a two-day journey to the infamous Parchman prison to retrieve their white father. Their harrowing experiences are bound up in unresolved and reverberating racial and family tensions and entanglements: long-buried memories of Pop's time in Parchman, the imminent death of Mam from cancer, and the slow dawning of the children's own spiritual gifts. Ward alternates perspectives to tell the story of a family in rural Mississippi struggling mightily to hold themselves together as they are assailed by ghosts reflecting all the ways humans create cruelty and suffering. In her first novel since the National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones (2011), Ward renders richly drawn characters, a strong sense of place, and a distinctive style that is at once down-to-earth and magical.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us, by Richard 0. Prum. (Doubleday, $30.) A mild-mannered ornithologist makes an impassioned case for the importance of Darwin's second theory as his most radical and feminist. COMING TO MY SENSES: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, by Alice Waters with Cristina Mueller and Bob Carrau. (Clarkson Potter, $27.) The founder of Chez Panisse describes her early days, explaining how a visit to France awakened her interest in excellent food and how she came to embrace the use of organic ingredients. FASTING AND FEASTING: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray, by Adam Federman. (Chelsea Green, $25.) Federman's biography is the first of a cult food writer who became famous with the 1986 publication of her influential book "Honey From a Weed." SING, UNBURIED, SING, by Jesmyn Ward. (Scribner, $26.) In her follow-up to the National Book Award-winning novel "Salvage the Bones," Ward tells the story of a Mississippi woman intent on making her fractured family whole again. THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1898, by Richard White. (Oxford, $35.) This sweeping history of the decades after the Civil War decries the spoliations White sees everywhere among Robber Barons and corrupt politicians. THE INTERNATIONALISTS: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) The two authors argue for the historic importance of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international agreement usually dismissed by historians as ineffectual and quixotic. In their revisionist view, the pact "reshaped the world map" and "catalyzed the human rights revolution." RESET: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, by Ellen K. Pao. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) Combining memoir, self-help, tell-all and manifesto, Pao recalls the disillusionment that led her to sue a venture capital firm for gender discrimination. She lost, but showed the hurdles women still face in many fields. THE MISFORTUNE OF MARION PALM, by Emily Culliton. (Knopf, $25.95.) In Culliton's delightful and sneakily feminist debut novel, a Brooklyn mother is on the lam after embezzling thousands of dollars from her daughters' private school. BONES: Brothers, Horses, Cartels, and the Borderland Dream, by Joe Tone. (One World, $28.) A reporter brilliantly recounts the tale of a Texas bricklayer who laundered drug money for his brother, a cartel boss in Mexico, via the horse-racing industry. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
In her follow-up fiction to the National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, Ward ambitiously fractures the extended family she portrays along race lines and moves her narrative from the tense realism of Southern rural poverty and prejudice to an African American-rooted magic realism. The story shifts among multiple narrators, opening with profoundly sympathetic Jojo and toddler sister Kayla living with grandparents Pop and Mam, who's dying of cancer. Their drug-raddled mother, -Leonie, rarely there and usually mean when she is, invests all her energy in longtime white lover Michael, the father of her children. Their arguments are epically brutal, yet when Michael is released from prison, -Leonie loads the children and friend Misty into the car and rushes north from their Mississippi Gulf home to retrieve him. Interwoven into this story is the moving relationship of near-adolescent Jojo with Pop, who tells Jojo about his own time in prison and his desperate efforts to protect a younger boy named Richie. The narrative, which is occasionally slowed by domestic detail, jerks tightly together on the ride home with the appearance of Richie's ghost and sails through to an otherworldly, vividly rendered ending. VERDICT Lyrical yet tough, Ward's distilled language effectively captures the hard lives, fraught relationships, and spiritual depth of her characters. [See Prepub Alert, 3/8/17.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.