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Loading... Sing, Unburied, Singby Jesmyn Ward
  
» 23 more Books Read in 2018 (99) Books Read in 2017 (2,248) Best of 2017 (6) Recommendations (6) New to Read (1) Zora Canon (16) Ghosts (189) The Zora Canon (19) Dead narrators (21) No current Talk conversations about this book. I was a bit disappointed in this one as I had read so may excellent reviews beforehand. It took me a long time to get into it and I guess I became discouraged. All in all just ok for me. (  ) myers3 | Jul 4, 2020 |  This book didn't go quite where I expected -- there were definitely more ghosts -- but I really enjoyed how well she captured the characters' atmospheres as well as their perspectives. I was particularly impressed with how much empathy the writer imbued in the mother character so the reader can clearly see the drivers behind her addiction and behavior. I also felt hungry throughout the book. I thought it was very subtle and effective the way the characters, especially the kids, just never eat and the mother refuses food at every turn. An effective, visceral touch. (  ) nancyjean19 | Jun 3, 2020 | This novel is a masterpiece like Beloved by Toni Morrison, from one of the strongest writers alive today. There is a character who is incredibly difficult to sympathize with, the apotheosis of who our culture tells us to hate and shame, but by the end, you at least understand her wounds. There is much more to the novel, which centers around a road trip by a young mother and her neglected children to pick their father up on freedom day from a prison with a brutal history. It is a thriller, a lyrical poem like the Odyssey, a ghost story, folk horror, a tragedy and a coming of age all in one. (  ) ThomasPluck | Apr 27, 2020 | Meh. I struggled to read this. I had to force myself to pick it up. Normally, I give up on something like this, but I was compelled to get to the end. I did zip through the ending and liked it. It had some great characters and I think that's what kept me reading and that's what earned it 3 stars. It just wasn't really my cup of tea. ( ) nwieme | Mar 19, 2020 | I listened to the book on audio - might not have gotten through it otherwise. It was well done, especially since this book jumps from character to character so the narrator had make each sound a little different. It centers on a family and a trip to get the daddy of the children - Jo Jo and his sister - after he has gotten out of jail. The daddy is white, the mother and her family are black, and the story is told by her, JoJo the boy and sometimes in flashbacks to a time when the grandfather was a prisoner at the same prison they are going to. It does get confusing at times. Especially when dead spirits or perhaps drug induced hallucinations show up. But I can see where it is an exploration of the craziness of life today. ( ) debs4jc | Mar 3, 2020 |
 Ward’s prose counterpoints the inhumanity. She’s always reaching for a simile, something to pin the moment and find redemption in it..Jojo, Leona and Richie tell the story in turn. The fecund delta draws out the baroque. You’re never far from growth. You’re never far from decay. Ward brings story to the edge of allegory and keeps it there without tipping over...Ward has to deal with the festering cache of Black American history, to look at historic and present hurt, and to look past it at the same time. She does it brilliantly... Ward’s writing is laced with compassion. The wonder is that she can find room for it. Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book award for fiction in the US. In many ways, though, it’s not as strong as Ward’s previous work, including her 2011 novel Salvage the Bones and her 2013 memoir Men We Reaped. Its dense lyricism is often heavy handed. In drawing on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying – both in its multiple first-person narratives and its story of a poor rural family that embarks on a wagon trek to Mississippi – it comes across as self-consciously literary...Jojo, fierce and tender, is the endearing heart of the novel; other characters, including Leonie, are fitfully ventriloquised and remain rather distant. The ramshackle journey at its spine and Ward’s rendering of the region’s dark geologies and histories are more potent than her awkward stage-managing of spirits and apparitions in the second half. Still, for all its occasional mis- and oversteps, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a brooding, pained meditation on the proposition, spelled out by Colson Whitehead in The Underground Railroad, that “America is a ghost in the darkness
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