Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing is a haunting and beautifully written novel that takes readers on an emotional journey through the lives of a struggling Mississippi family. The story revolves around thirteen-year-old Jojo, his toddler sister Kayla, and their drug-addicted mother, Leonie. As Leonie takes her children on a road trip to pick up their father, Michael, from prison, the narrative delves deep into themes of family, trauma, and the supernatural.

What stands out most in this novel is Ward's lyrical prose. Her writing is poetic and evocative, bringing the harsh realities of rural Mississippi to life with vivid detail. The alternating perspectives between Jojo, Leonie, and the ghost of a young boy named Richie add layers of complexity to the story, allowing readers to experience the characters' inner struggles and histories.

Jojo's perspective is particularly compelling as he navigates the responsibilities of caring for his younger sister and the absence of reliable parental figures. His bond with his grandparents, Pop and Mam, provides a source of stability and wisdom, contrasting sharply with Leonie's erratic behavior. Leonie, on the other hand, is a deeply flawed character whose grief and addiction make it difficult for her to connect with her children. Her narrative offers a raw and unfiltered look at the challenges of motherhood and personal redemption.

The inclusion of supernatural elements, such as Richie's ghost and the spiritual connections to the past, adds a haunting dimension to the novel. These elements serve as a reminder of the lingering effects of racial violence and injustice that continue to impact the characters' lives.

While the novel's slow pace might not appeal to everyone, the depth of character development and emotional resonance make it a rewarding read. Sing, Unburied, Sing is a powerful exploration of family, resilience, and the ghosts that haunt us, both literally and figuratively. Ward's storytelling leaves a lasting impact, making this a novel that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Not an easy book to get into in view of the killing of a goat early on, which is barbaric.

However, if you persevere you will find a fascinating insight into family life in a Gothic fashion.

I absolutely adore this book. I spent the whole time I was reading it just waiting for bad things to happen. It's so beautifully written and so moving that I finished it and couldn't even think of picking up another book for about a day. I wanted to reread it almost as soon as I had finished it.

Very unique and special, loved the voice of the main character and the insight into a different way of life it gave me. Great writing.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is lyrical and mesmerising, and so sad in places that I didn't always 'enjoy' the story, but I absolutely loved it. As with Ward's previous Salvage the Bones, I felt completely transported to a different time and place, even though I've never been there.

I heard Sing, Unburied, sing as a 'roadtrip' novel, but while the journey is a significant part of the novel I felt it was more about home, in all its forms, for each of the characters whose stories are told.

Firstly, I had to skip a few pages at the start as I am incapable of dealing with animal deaths in fiction (humans, yeah fine! Animals no) and there was a scene involving the killing and butchering of a goat. But, once past that this book blew my mind! By alternating between Jojo and his mother Leonie's narration, Ward presents the painful and conflicting emotions in their family. Ward encourages empathy for a hard-to-like addict Mother who is crippled by jealousy at the bond her children share, while demonstrating how her priorities and choices result in pushing Jojo and Kayla further away. I felt Jojo's affinity for the natural world and the interjections from Richie, a ghost, added a mysterious and malignant air. One of my best reads so far this year.

I really can't find the words to describe this novel. It is beautiful. It is lyrical. It is moving. It is sad. When people have asked me to describe what the story is about, I find that I can't...... it's just one of those novels that you need to read yourself to understand why.

McArthur Fellow and National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward is also having a literary moment. The author’s third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, tells the story of a black family in rural Mississippi. Thirteen year-old Jojo and his toddler sister Kayla live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, who subsist on a small ranch. Jojo’s mother, Leonie, takes the kids with her to collect their white father, Michael, from Parchman Farm – a penitentiary that continues the area’s long slave tradition into the modern day.

The road trip is largely narrated from Jojo and Leonie’s points of view. Jojo is a great protagonist – too sensitive to rebel but enough to care for his sister like a daughter. Leonie, a junkie without a mothering instinct, is more stereotypical. Most of what we learn about Leonie comes from conversations between other characters. Their narratives overlap, but their voices are not distinct enough from each other to be impactful. While their daily struggles to connect feel real, the bigger moments in the novel often reach for higher meaning without quite grasping it. Dramatic scenes that feel raw at first become weighed down with too much detail, and instead of a satisfying crescendo their tension melts away. But the biggest problem with the novel is that the story is complicated by the voices of ghosts, one family member and a young boy from Pop’s past. Unfortunately, the author’s ambition overreaches in attempting to integrate their stories, and ultimately fails to make two divergent stories cohere into one novel.

https://www.librarything.com/work/18904625

One of my books of the year without a doubt. A strong, original voice and compelling storytelling - I have already recommended this book to a number of friends and am excited to see it appear on prize lists as the year progresses. Loved it.

No words i write can do this novel justice. It is simply stunning.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is set in the same Southern US community as her previous work, Salvage The Bones, putting us amidst a struggling mixed race family, a young black woman Leonie, who fell in love with Michael from a racist white family implicated in a tragedy that affected her family. In its telling, it traverses love, grief, terminal illness, addiction, prejudice, dysfunctional parenting, hope and survival, the effect this mix has on everyone touched by it, the painful and the poignant.

Leonie falls so quickly for Michael, she is blind to the bind she must endure, that of premature motherhood when she has barely experienced or indulged sufficiently the early infatuation of young love. As a result, she is forever seeking those moments, she is trapped in hedonistic romanticism, she has eyes only for Michael and is unable to embrace, and often rejects motherhood – or as her mother feared, perhaps she never had a maternal instinct at all.

…from the first moment I saw him walking across the grass to where I sat in the shadow of the school sign, he saw me. Saw past skin the colour of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the colour of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.

She and her 13-year-old son Jojo and toddler Kayla, live with her parents, as Michael is in jail. Leonie gets word he is to be released and takes the children on a nightmare road trip to pick him up. Throughout most of the story Kayla is unwell, she is always in the arms of her brother, it is he that calms and reassures her.

When Leonie puts herself in danger, the apparition of her brother ‘Given’ appears. He is her conscience. He is not the only apparition hanging around the family. Jojo sees a boy who calls himself Richie, and Kayla can see him too. He wants Jojo to ask his grandfather to tell him the rest of the story he has partially told about him, of this boy Richie.

Restless unburied souls.

I want to tell the boy in the car this. Want to tell him how his pop tried to save me again and again, but he couldn’t.

The novel is narrated from three different points of view, Jojo, his mother Leonie and briefly the spectre of the young man Richie. Jojo is the most reliable and frequent narrator, even while he does have visions of this ghost-like figure. He is the quiet observer of everything, he adapts, he is responsible, he knows they are better off with his grandfather, he is loyal to his mother. He needs to take care of his sister, he has become both parents.

“Sometimes, late at night, when I’m listening to Pop search the dark, and Kayla’s snoring beside me, I think I understand Leonie. I think I now something about what she feels. That maybe I know a little bit about why she left after Mam died, why she slapped me, why she ran. I feel it in me, too. An itching in my hands. A kicking in my feet. A fluttering in the middle of my chest. An unsettling. Deeper. It turns me awake every time I feel myself slipping. It tosses me like a ball through the air. Around three a.m., it lets me drop, and I sleep.”

He accepts the presence of the ghost-like boy Richie, he is aware that it has some need to be fulfilled, though he is wary due to the role he has assumed, to protect his sister. Is it because their grandmother is dying that these restless souls are hanging around? It becomes one of the questions readers will ask themselves, and I found it interesting that I at no point interpreted this as a psychological problem for those who were able to see or sense these apparitions, they were like a puzzle to be solved, or a problem to be ignored, the fact that Jojo hears Richie validated their presence, while Leonie’s visions are easily attributed to her altered state.

Leonie is like a little girl lost, she has some awareness of what she should be doing, but little ability to push herself to do it. Her grief over her brother, her disappointment at her ability to have a connection with Michael’s racist family, her disappointment in herself lead to apathy, to knowing, but lacking the will to act on her better judgement, of which we see glimmers. She isn’t horrid or badly intentioned, she is seeking escape and Michael both reminds her of her pain and is where, and with whom she wishes to bury herself, to flee it.

There is a reference to her novel Salvage The Bones, as the family return from their road trip, they pass a young couple walking a dog, it is the brother and sister, Skeetah and Eschelle, from the neighbourhood, protagonists of that earlier novel. I was curious to know if the dog was related to China, an unresolved thread left hanging from her earlier novel. I was delighted to encounter them.

In many ways Salvage The Bones was the more straight forward story, Esch (in Salvage) and Jojo (in Sing) are similar characters, coming-of-age and surviving a dysfunctional family. Jojo has the stability and wisdom of his grandfather to ground him, and the care of his sister prevents him from becoming too focused on his own situation. There is hope. However, the supernatural element, which is a lot more than a mere splash of magic realism, makes this a more complex narrative that stretches the reader’s imagination much further to make sense of what is happening, a reminder of dangers, of threats, of the precariousness of young, black lives.

It’s challenging to spend the week there, navigating the lives of this family that seems to have little hope and while Jojo seems to be a sensible child, his interactions with the dead suggest life will continue to challenge him.

It reminded me a little of the magical presence used by some Caribbean authors I enjoy, where ancestors often bring a message or wisdom to the one who is able to sense their presence.

It’s a book that is often uncomfortable to read, but challenges the reader to think deeper than what they encounter on the surface, to ponder the meaning of some of those scenes, especially the end. I think it is a book that is all the more enjoyable for the thoughts it provokes on finishing it, for the discussion it invites you to have with other readers, and this for me is where its brilliance lies, it normalises the mystical, using it to make the reader think beyond the actual events of the story, to question how the lives of others continue to impact the lives of their descendants.

It demonstrates the effect on the young of the tragedies of the past and the need for resolution, for those unburied, restless souls to be freed from their pain, so that the living can be free of and unencumbered by it too.

Both Jesmyn Ward’s books Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) won the prestigious National Book Award in the US, an award that always highlights excellent fiction and nonfiction being published in the US and they have just announced this year that they will now include a fifth National Book Award for translated works of fiction and nonfiction published in the U.S.

Listen below to Jesmyn reading her acceptance speech and speaking to those who question why they should read her books, about the universality of the stories she writes.

“As a lifelong reader, I fell in love with classic “odyssey” novels early on—especially As I Lay Dying, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yet I always felt somehow outside these books. This novel responds to that tradition, reflecting the realities of being black and poor in the South, the realities of my people and my community. …My characters face the terrible consequences of racism and poverty wherever they go, but they also have an incredible, tender, transformative love for each other. I wanted to acknowledge all of the forces that work against us and our ability to survive despite all.” Jesmyn Ward

If you've heard anything about recent releases, you've heard of Sung Unburied Sing. The hype is deserved; this is compelling magical realism that doesn't shy away from historical reality.

A moving and terrifying novel in equal measures, the use of magical realism in this novel was so well crafted. What starts out as a story about a black family in the American south struggling with drugs, poverty and racism, becomes something much bigger, exploring the history of the black experience. I loved all of the characters and couldn't put it down.

I picked up this book because there has been a lot of hype surrounding it, and it didn’t disappoint. The story is told from the perspectives of Jojo, his mother Leonie, and the ghost of Richie. Parts of it reminded me of Lincoln in the Bardo because of Richie’s narrative, and his search for freedom and peace.
There is a lot packed into just over 300 pages but this novel is essentially about relationships. The bond between Jojo and his Pops, between Leonie and her mother, the damaging relationship between Leonie and her white boyfriend, and his abusive and racist family. The relationships between Leonie and her 2 children, and most importantly the relationship between Jojo and Kayla, his baby sister. This was the most heartwarming part of the novel - Jojo’s love for Kayla reminded me of Holden Caulfield’s love for his sister Phoebe in The Catcher in the Rye. Any fans of that book will know what I’m talking about.
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I have been really torn about whether to give this 4 or 5 stars because as much as I enjoyed it there were sections that I didn’t really get on with. If I compare it with my favourite books of last year, there was just something that didn’t make me feel as passionately about this one, so it’s a solid 4 stars for me. Which is still great!

Maybe I came to read “Sing, Unburied, Sing” by Jesmyn Ward with too much expectation since it has recently won the National Book Award and many people recommended it to me, but it took me some time for me to get into this novel. The bulk of the story is made up of a car journey Leonie takes with her two children Jojo and Kayla to pick up their father Michael who is being released from prison. Leonie's colleague and friend Misty also accompanies them and takes them on a detour to pick up/transfer drugs. Gradually spirit figures appear around them as there is a hereditary condition where this family can commune with the dead. So the past is folded into the present in a way which is ultimately quite poignant. With the meandering nature of the story it felt like it took a while before I really knew the characters, but once I got into it I found the novel quite moving.

Jojo is the one who primarily cares for young Kayla as he observes of Leonie that “she ain't got the mothering instinct.” I found it really touching how the novel shows some people aren't natural parents and the way other family step in to fill the role of caregiver – particularly for someone as young as Kayla. During a scene where she becomes quite ill there's an added layer of tension because Leonie doesn't know how to properly care for her. Leonie's parents are referred to as Mam and Pop as if, even though they are the grandparents, they are still the primary parental figures guiding Jojo and Kayla.

Another thing I really liked about this novel was the way it draws in stories of the past with the ghost-like figures who follow the main characters and the tales that Pop tells Jojo. It shows the way that racism and economic inequality are still part of the present reality in Mississippi. This is very much made evident when the car is stopped by a policeman at one point and the officer cuffs and holds a gun to thirteen year old Jojo's head: “that black gun is there. It is a tingle at the back of my skull, an itching on my shoulder.” The message this drives into the boy is that his life is expendable and that he is considered a threat even when he's done nothing wrong. Ward describes how “It's like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone. 'It's like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.' Like my marrow could carry a bruise.” It's really powerful how she shows the way brutality towards black and poor people effect long-lasting psychological trauma and writes itself into a person's whole being and how this is directly linked to the region's ongoing racism.

However, although I appreciated the way that the stories from the past and brought into these characters' current reality, it didn't feel like the spirits' presence was entirely necessary. At times it felt like this element of the story was overstating the case, especially when Kayla shows signs of seeing presences beyond ordinary reality. The story gets too concerned at some points with explaining a world beyond the senses rather than letting it linger there mysteriously. I couldn't help comparing this to Cynthia Bond's novel “Ruby” which felt like it incorporated a complex supernatural element more subtly and poetically. Meaningful storytelling between characters is sometimes enough to show the impact of the past without warping reality.

Jesmyn Ward writing is exquisitely beautiful and I enjoyed reading this novel for the prose alone. Sometimes little inconsistent details would pull me out of the story. For instance, she states quite clearly at one point that there is nothing to clean Kayla up with when she gets sick because the glove compartment has already been emptied, but then later on she observes how “The glove compartment is a mess of napkins and ketchup packets and baby wipes.” Small things like this can sometimes undermine the momentum and strength of the narrative. But, overall, I really appreciated and enjoyed this novel.

If you’re a fan of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Cynthia Bond’s Ruby, this is absolutely a book for you. Jojo, just turned 13, and his mother Leonie are the two primary narrators in this story of a mixed-race family haunted—both literally and figuratively—by the effects of racism, drug abuse and incarceration in Bois Sauvage, the fictional Mississippi town in which Ward’s trio of novels have taken place. They set out on a road trip to Parchman prison to collect Michael, the white father of Leonie’s two children, whose sentence has just ended. Everyone is hungry; three-year-old Kayla can barely stop throwing up (has there ever been a book with quite so much vomiting?); and a stop to pick up some meth threatens to get them in hot water on the way back when they’re stopped by police.

You’re never quite sure as you’re reading this just how dark Ward will let things get. As dark as you like would be true to the nature of racially motivated police action in America in recent years. But the beauty of the language rises above the squalor of poverty and drug addiction. I thought the novel got a bit overwritten and overwrought in the last 10%, so although this is very good indeed, I’m not jumping out of my chair, to echo Simon Cowell. However, I’m eager to read more by Ward.

A favorite passage (from Leonie): “Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. … But when Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that too. Can eat a person until there’s nothing left but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left.”

I loved reading this powerful book by Jesmyn Ward. This book really does pack a punch and focuses around many real life struggles such as drug addiction, cancer, young age pregnancy, racism and domestic violence. Jesmyn also puts a lot of thought into the development of her characters. It was intriguing to read about such a dysfunctional family! This story is dark and intense with a plot so well written. I adore this writing style and how I could really connect with the characters. This was a very strong read

This is the most grittily realistic book I’ve read in a while — it just happens to be a ghost story. Somehow, despite its fantastical content, Sing, Unburied, Sing feels distinctly believable.

The plot is simple; it’s a road trip, there and back again. Thirteen-year-old Jojo, and his little sister Kayla, are dragged across Mississippi by their drug-addicted mum, Leonie, to pick up their dad from prison. At home the two children are mainly looked after by their beloved grandfather, Pop, so being in their mum’s care has its own challenges. It also happens that Parchman prison is the same place Pop spent some years as an innocent teenager. While they’re there this time, Jojo encounters the ghost of one of Pop’s fellow inmates, who then hitches a ride back with them to confront Pop and find out the truth about his death.

And this happens in the most vivid and claustrophobic of settings.

In the swampy heat of Bois, where animals are skinned in a shed out back, and popular young black guys still get shot when they win a game they weren’t supposed to, it doesn’t feel like a stretch that the violently dead are creeping around and dripping from the trees. Instead of feeling fantastical, it feels painfully true. The dead are bearing down on the living. It’s just another brutal reality of the life there, metaphor or not.

But it’s the love that shines incandescently from the pages here, blasting through all the oppressive threat and tension and lighting the novel up from within. Jojo’s love for his toddler sister Kayla and hers for him, Pop’s for his grandson, his wife Mam’s for her daughter Leonie, despite everything, and Leonie’s inexpressible love for her children. As Mam explains to Jojo: Leonie does love them, just her love for herself and their dad, Michael, confuses that.

Leonie is a heartbreaking character. She is a terrible mum, a disappointing daughter and a million miles from the person she wants to be. Her actions speak of nothing else. But half the book is written from her viewpoint, and from there we see the almost-actions, the missed moments, the pulsing desires she never manages to express, the intentions that don’t make it out of her brain and into the real world. The most painful is the deep, confused love she feels for Jojo and Kayla that she’ll never express, and they’ll never feel or realise. These missed connections hit as deeply as the bigger, wider tragedies of the novel.

Kayla, incidentally, is the most vivid unspeaking character I can imagine — despite only being old enough to say ‘eat eat’ and ‘no!’ her physicality steps from the page. She is a fully formed character, with her own arc to follow. One of the most touching moments in the book is down to her too. As well as seeing ghosts, Jojo can hear the thoughts of animals, and that translates to understanding the things Kayla can’t yet express. In a scene where her dad is yelling at her and the toddler Kayla is screaming, Jojo says: ““I know you mad. I know you mad. I know you mad, Kayla. But I’m going to take you outside later, okay? Just sit up and eat, okay? I know you mad. Come here. Come here.” I say this to her because sometimes I hear words between her howls, hear her thinking: Why don’t he listen why don’t he listen I feel! I put my hands under her armpits, and she squirms and wails.”

And the ghosts. It’s not just Richie, Pop’s onetime fellow inmate, but Leonie’s murdered brother too. And as your eyes and imagination adjust, you get the feeling they’re surrounded by spectres. At once comforting and deeply creepy, sad and threatening, the ghosts fill the novel with subtlety and loss, just like Jesmyn Ward’s living do. So much haunts her characters, that the ghosts seem an insubstantial addition to that, simply echoing back the living hell and hopelessness. Dragging them further down with the weight of history and violence.

But while all that history does hang heavy over everything in this novel, while it does drip from the trees, there is something in Jojo, something in Kayla, and perhaps a little something in all the other characters too, that leaves you with a kernel of hope. And those heartbreaking, touching moments; both the missed connections and the ones that hit deeply home, mean the lasting impression is one of love.

It took me a while to get into the groove of this book, but once I was in, I was totally hooked. It is a book which sits well with Hillbilly Elegy which I read recently. Both books about poverty in America and with similar casts of characters. I think Jesmyn Ward is a wonderful writer, she has nailed the feelings of a mother, Leonie, cast adrift, torn between the love of her children and the love of her man. The internal conflicts she feels are so hard to read.

Most of the story takes place in a car. It is on it's way to Parchman, a prison where Michael who is the father of Jojo and Michaela has been incarcerated. The trip in the hot car, where Michaela is being sick constantly is really horrendous. The stench, is all pervading. Jojo takes care of Michaela, with Leonie caught up in getting them there and the drama that entails, he is playing a role he is too young to take on. He is such a wonderful boy, so kind, so caring and so seemingly accepting of the horrible things that are happening to him on this journey.

It is a family drama, a story of the ghosts of the past which haunt the present. Of class and insecurity, drugs and mistrust. An uncomfortable read but ultimately one that will stay with me for a very long time.