148
Book · 2017
Sing, Unburied, Sing
A thirteen-year-old boy travelling across rural Mississippi with his mother and toddler sister embarks on a fraught road trip to pick up his white father upon release from the state penitentiary. Guided by visceral family memories and pursued by restless spirits of historical racial trauma, the journey exposes the living and dead to mutual reckoning.
Your call
Already know it? Recommend it too.
Details
Around the Web
In this lush and lonely novel, Ward lets the dead sing. It's a kind of burial.
Annalisa Quinn on NPR Jesmyn Ward's gorgeous and bleak novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, takes readers on the great American road trip. But unlike Jack Kerouac's carefree roadster, Ward's junker is loaded down with a baby in a car seat, a couple of ghosts, a package of crystal meth and the oppressive weight of racism — past and present.
Maureen Corrigan on NPR What follows is a gripping story of struggle, family bonds and racial injustice, told in alternating chapters by multiple narrators: Jojo; his drug-addicted mother, Leonie; and the ghost of a young boy long dead but still aching for answers. Set along Ward’s native Mississippi Gulf Coast – the setting, too, for her last novel, the indelible Salvage the Bones – Sing, Unburied, Sing shows an author with a commanding voice and a big, unflinching heart.
Melissa Block on NPR
1 / 3
Why people recommend it
No reasons shared yet. Tell others what makes this title worth their time.