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Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
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Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel (edition 2017)

by Jesmyn Ward (Author)

Series: Bois Sauvage (2)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
3,9281943,095 (4.06)357
Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.… (more)
Member:AeshaMali
Title:Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel
Authors:Jesmyn Ward (Author)
Info:Scribner (2017), Edition: 1st, 304 pages
Collections:Your library, Read but unowned
Rating:***
Tags:to-read, Import from Goodreads, short-ish-books-under-300pp

Work Information

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

  1. 40
    Beloved by Toni Morrison (BookshelfMonstrosity)
    BookshelfMonstrosity: Mournful spirits haunt both shattering works of African American magical realism that examine the effects of slavery (Beloved) and racism (Unburied) on women and children. Lyrical language and stylistically complex storytelling provide bulwarks from which to glimpse unbearable suffering in each.… (more)
  2. 00
    Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines (BookshelfMonstrosity)
    BookshelfMonstrosity: These searing novels feature complex, tragic, and flawed characters in the deep South and are set in part in punitive work camps where choices are limited, the threat of violence ubiquitous, and the corridors of fate narrow and unyielding.… (more)
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» See also 357 mentions

English (190)  Spanish (2)  All languages (192)
Showing 1-5 of 190 (next | show all)
This novel is about a poor black/mixed race family in modern day Mississippi but there are a lot of flashbacks to earlier 1900s. The mom and kids are on a road trip to pick up dad from prison. The grandmother is dying of cancer. Many of the characters scan see ghosts and have conversations with them.

The writing is very beautiful and poetic, but the plot moved very slowly especially in the first half. The second half was much better, though a little hard to follow, at least on audiobook. Jojo and Pop saved the book; the other characters I mostly found annoying and beyond stupid, making one bad decision after another. Even the 3 year old was just annoying as hell. The story is so so sad, horrific is parts, with hemes of death, home, and family. I can't say I enjoyed the book, though I think it was well written, just not for me. ( )
  technodiabla | Mar 8, 2024 |
Ward's writing sings. ( )
  ben_r47 | Feb 22, 2024 |
What worked for me were the characterizations of Leonie and Jojo, how she had no understanding or empathy of what is was like to be him and what her impact on him was. How she and Michael thought it was OK to just order him around. It felt like an honest representation of parenthood. They seemed like real people.
What didn't work for me was the magic realism element; I would have liked it if it had been metaphorical but not as the hinge for the climax. Also I thought the Richie storyline with Pa's reveal of what happened to Richie was too contrived. I would have preferred Richie's story to be edited out of the book.
Even though the magic realism element didn't work for me, it did result in some beautiful imagery, especially Richie's vision of the island, but also the descriptions of his post-death experiences, the snake and the crow, his generations haunting Parchman.
Also, final point, I did not like or even understand the last chapter. I would have preferred something that came back to Jojo's coming of age story, instead of just a weird mystery. ( )
  read.to.live | Feb 10, 2024 |
Stunning and lyrical. Full of the sound and songs of the South, of Mississippi. Ghost-filled and other worldly. Beautifully told, finely rendered. A must-read. ( )
  fmclellan | Jan 23, 2024 |
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.
  b00kdarling87 | Jan 7, 2024 |
Showing 1-5 of 190 (next | show all)
At just 304 pages long, “Sing, Unburied, Sing” is a road novel, a ghost story, a family epic, and damning testimony bearing witness to terrible crimes. It is also unforgettable.
 
...Ward is seeking something more from (or perhaps for) her characters. And so the road trip, and the drug drama, and the struggle for wholeness unfold against a series of more mysterious events.... For each of these characters, living or dead, what lies unasked or unspoken becomes an impediment not just to happiness or social mobility but to literal deliverance — and each must decide whether to rise to the occasion, whether to let what he or she harbors sound out. Maybe that’s the miracle here: that ordinary people whose lives have become so easy to classify into categories like rural poor, drug-dependent, products of the criminal justice system, possess the weight and the value of the mythic — and not only after death; that 13-year-olds like Jojo might be worthy of our rapt attention while their lives are just beginning.... Such feats of empathy are difficult, all too often impossible to muster in real life. But they feel genuinely inevitable when offered by a writer of such lyric imagination as Ward. “Sing, Unburied, Sing” is many things: a road novel, a slender epic of three generations and the ghosts that haunt them, and a portrait of what ordinary folk in dire circumstances cleave to as well as what they — and perhaps we all — are trying to outrun.
added by Lemeritus | editNew York Times Book Reviews, Tracy K. Smith (pay site) (Sep 22, 2017)
 
This is a lyrical howl of a book that knows exactly when to go quiet and when to make its cries almost unbearable. It's a story of unfinished business, for both a country still struggling to live up to its ideals and for the ghosts that walk through these pages ... The past is its own character in Sing, Unburied, Sing, ready to burst in without a moment's notice and remind everyone it never really went away. If William Faulkner mined the South for gothic, stream-of-consciousness tragedy, and Toni Morrison conjured magical realism from the corroding power of the region's race hatred, then Ward is a worthy heir to both. This is not praise to be taken lightly. Ward has the command of language and the sense of place, the empathy and the imagination, to carve out her own place among the literary giants.
added by Lemeritus | editThe Dallas Morning News, Chris Vognar (Sep 8, 2017)
 
The title Sing, Unburied, Sing seems to echo the opening of the Iliad, when Homer asks the muse to sing of unburied bodies left on the battlefield of Troy "a feast for dogs and birds," while the dead men's souls descend to Hades. Homer's poems were meant to act as immortal grave markers for the war dead, even as the physical graves and bodies would rot away. We're still singing for those Greek corpses; why not, Jesmyn Ward asks, sing for the generations of black Southerners undone by racism and history, lynched, raped, enslaved, shot, and imprisoned? In this lush and lonely novel, Ward lets the dead sing. It's a kind of burial.
 
However eternal its concerns, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Ward’s new book, is perfectly poised for the moment. It combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with a timely treatment of the long aftershocks of a hurricane and the opioid epidemic devouring rural America....With the supernatural cast to the story, everything feels heightened. The clearest influence is Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” — the child returning from the dead, bitter and wronged and full of questions. The echoes in the language feel like deliberate homage.... The ghosts — most of them, at any rate — want to rest, but they need restitution first. They need to know what happened to them, and why. It’s the unfinished business of a nation, playing out today in the calls for the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers and in the resurgence of the Klan.
added by Lemeritus | editNew York Times, Parul Sehgal (pay site) (Sep 5, 2017)
 

» Add other authors (1 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Ward, Jesmynprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Chalk, Chrissecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Miceli, JayaCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Sundström, JoakimTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Wesley, Rutinasecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
Who are we looking for, who are we looking for?
It's Equiano we're looking for.
Has he gone to the stream? Let him come back.
Has he gone to the farm? Let him return.
It's Equiano we're looking for.

----Kwa chant about the disappearance of Equiano an African boy
The memory is a living thing---it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives---the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.

---from One Writer's Beginnings,
by Eudora Welty
The Gulf shines dull as lead. The coast of Texas
glints like a metal rim. I have no home
as long as summer bubbling to its head

boils for that day when in the Lord God's name
the coals of fire are heaped upon the head
of all whose gospel is the whip and flame,

age after age, the uninstructing dead.

--from "The Gulf," by Derek Walcott
Dedication
For my mother, Norine Elizabeth Dedeaux, who loved me before I took my first breath. Every second of my life, she shows me so.
First words
I like to think I know what death is.
Quotations
This the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout.
How the dolphins were dying off, how whole pods of them washed up on the beaches in Florida, in Louisiana, in Alabama and Mississippi: oil-burnt, sick with lesions, hollowed out from the insides. And then Michael said something I’ll never forget: Some scientists for BP said this didn’t have nothing to do with the oil, that sometimes this is what happens to animals: they die for unexpected reasons. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes all at once. And then Michael looked at me and said: And when that scientist said that, I thought about humans. Because humans is animals.
He’s been orbiting her like a moon, sleeping on the sofa with his back to the door, searching the yard and woods for pens and bins and machines to fix so he can repair in the face of what he cannot.
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Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

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Haiku summary
JoJo is tender,
Straight-backed as murdering Pop;
Kayla, too, sees ghosts.

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