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Loading... Sing, Unburied, Singby Jesmyn Ward
  
» 25 more Top Five Books of 2020 (166) Books Read in 2018 (99) Books Read in 2017 (2,356) The Zora Canon (16) Best of 2017 (6) Zora Canon (15) Recommendations (6) A's favorite novels (12) Ghosts (200) Contemporary Fiction (28) Dead narrators (27) No current Talk conversations about this book. Racism and injustice against African-Americans is juxtaposed against an inter-racial relationship. Throw in some ghosts and parent-child tension. I don't quite get the role of ghosts here but the tension between the adults and the kids is brilliantly written. By alternating perspectives, you know how Jojo feels towards his parents and how Leonie loves her kids but just can't be a good mother. In fact, she is jealous of her son, who is like a parent to Kayla. The other relationships eg. Pop and Mam, Leonie and her parents are well-written too. (  ) siok | May 15, 2021 |  13-year-old Jojo lives with his toddler sister, Kayla, his loving grandparents, Pop, kind and protective, and Mam, bedridden with cancer, and his often absent, often high mother, Leonie. This is a poor black family, but Leonie's husband, and father of her children, Michael, is white. She loves him to a fault, abandoning her children when the mood strikes her to be with him. He too is a drug addict, but he loves Leonie. The action centers around a trip to bring Michael home when he is released from prison. Leonie takes both of her children, and also her best friend and fellow drug abuser. Along the trip Leonie is visited occasionally by the ghost of her dead brother, and Jojo is visited by the ghost of a boy his own age who died in prison with Pop, many years earlier. For me, the ghost element was disconcerting, and left me getting more out of Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones; Ward's two earlier novels. This book is exceptional, and I'd still recommend it - I just like the others more. It is a dismal and sad tale, with very little uplifting to it, except for the solemn honesty of Pop, and the innocence of Jojo. But all of the characters are well developed, and multi-faceted. None of them are portrayed as 100% bad (with the possible exception of Michael's father.) ( ) fingerpost | May 12, 2021 | Beautiful, brutal. Ward’s deliberate attempt to be ambiguous about the date of the book’s events forever situates it in the present of the reader, asserting that America will always be haunted by the ghosts of its violent history no matter how much time passes. The prose engages all five senses without being overbearing, immersing the reader in the bodies of the characters to feel, taste, smell, hear, and see what they do. Though all characters were predictable as familiar archetypes, they were written well. ( ) jiyoungh | May 3, 2021 | A hauntingly great read. ( ) illmunkeys | Apr 22, 2021 | Fantastic audiobook narrators. Painful, beautiful story. (  ) revatait | Feb 21, 2021 |
 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
"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. 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. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers. 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. Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward's distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature"-- No library descriptions found. |
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