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Loading... Sing, Unburied, Singby Jesmyn Ward
  
» 17 more No current Talk conversations about this book. My first response to this is that it wasn't as good as Salvage the Bones which is harsh as I believe that book to be one of the finest novels I have ever read. But there was something more that bothered me about this book. There was just too much familiar ground for it to feel like it stood on its own. The ghosts, the slave narrative, the drugs, the neglect. I read large chunks of this with a genuine sense of dread that worse things would happen, but in the end, the worst thing that happened was life caried on just as miserably as before. Disappointing, not just because it's not as good as Ms. Ward's earlier novel, but also because it was no better than a ton of other books I've read since. (  ) asxz | Mar 13, 2019 |  Haunting. Jesmyn Ward has been described as the heir to Toni Morrison, and she absolutely deserves that title. She relentlessly depicts the effects of poverty, racism, and drugs in the deep South. But while Salvage the Bones shows the strength of family ties, Sing, Unburied, Sing heartbreakingly shows their limitations. This is a devastating story that I will be thinking about for a long time. (  ) doryfish | Mar 6, 2019 | Read it to learn through your heart why Black Lives Matter. Not in a preachy, hit-you-0ver-the head way, but in a real world, real people, empathetic way. A must read, for the same reasons as [b:White Tears|30780283|White Tears|Hari Kunzru|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473185233s/30780283.jpg|51368613]. (  ) badube | Mar 6, 2019 | Jojo is 13-years old and lives with his mom, grandparents, and little sister, Kayla. His father, Michael, is in jail. When Michael is let out of jail, Jojo’s mom, Leonie, takes the kids (and her best friend, who also has a boyfriend in the same jail) to go pick him up. Leonie and Michael are an interracial couple and his parents didn’t approve, so they aren’t quite sure where they’ll go. Leonie isn’t a very good mom. The story is told, mostly between Jojo’s and Leonie’s points of view. There is a 3rd POV, Richie, who I didn’t include in the summary. I could have done without Richie and his story altogether, really. Could have done without the ghosts and magical realism, in general. I didn’t like Leonie or Michael, but I did like Jojo and Kayla, and Pop, their grandfather. There was some back and forth in time, especially at the start of the book. Overall, I’m giving this 3 stars, ok. I did like the dysfunctional family storyline, and would have preferred the book stick to that part of the story. ( ) LibraryCin | Mar 3, 2019 | Often while I was reading Sing, Unburied, Sing, I had to hush my inner critic. Yes, Jesmyn Ward weaves some wonderful scenes and vivid sentences, but she really isn’t doing anything new. Yes, that climax is gut-wrenchingly affective, but it really isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before. It’s almost too easy to dismiss Sing, Unburied, Sing as just another book about a tormented family surviving racial injustice in the South, a setting that tends to invite ghosts (of which there are plenty here.) It’s easy to say that the narrative is nothing original and that the conclusion was powerful, but trite. Yes, I can just say, Jesmyn Ward isn’t doing anything new—she’s just carrying on the various traditions of Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, John Steinbeck… Or I can say, “Damn, Jesmyn Ward is carrying on the tradition of Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison…John Steinbeck, and she’s doing a fabulous job of it!” ( ) chrisblocker | Mar 3, 2019 |
 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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