This was really good. It was slice of life, which isn’t my favorite type of story, but these characters were great and the story was heartbreaking. The writing was really good and I enjoyed it.

Was not able to access the book. Switched from a BN tablet to a Kindle. The download would not access my Kindle

Rich in detail, family and horror. Really excellent and only sorry it took me so long to get to this.

A book about haunting and death but also the living and barely alive. This book digs at the heart of why impacted people - Black folks in this case - are more vulnerable to the hauntings of those murdered by racists. It also shows how these hauntings can lead people down roads that are cyclical and unceasing.

A beautiful, powerful, profound book. I've read it twice and led a book club discussion on this one because I loved it so much. A rich text full of things to talk about, and I'll read anything Ward writes now.

I'm not sure what it is about Ward that I just can't enjoy. Her writing is undeniably powerful, her prose both lyrical and brutal as she tackles tough subjects of race, violence, incarceration, drugs and trauma. Her work draws strongly from the traditions of Toni Morrison and her use of the ghostly conjures Beloved. But I just didn't feel it the way the earlier work touched me so profoundly. Rather, it seemed to suffer by comparison. Having also read Salvage the Bones with similar mixed feelings I can only conclude that, for whatever reason, Ward is not the author for me. It's always a shame to acknowledge an author's talent without being able to fully engage with it. It's not you Jesmyn, it's definitely me.

This book has won so many awards, and it's easy to see why. This story sent me on an emotional roller coaster in the best kind of way. There were some parts that went a little slower, but overall, I know this is a book I'll remember for a long time.

I'm clearing out books that I requested ages ago and have been on sale for years! I really enjoyed this title.

There is literally nothing in the world that Ward could write that I would not jump to read, and Sing, Unburied, Sing is no exception. Brilliant, heartbreaking, whipsmart, incisive, insightful. Everything we want in a novel that makes us feel and burn and think.

This book was haunting, and the writing is beautiful. The pacing was a little off for me since the most of it is slower and takes its time, which left the ending feeling a little rushed to me.

This is a beautifully written story following a mother and her two children as they travel across the country to meet their father who has been released from jail. The characters are really interesting, and I liked the different perspectives and voices - although they weren't always entirely convincing in their use of language.

Unfortunately for me, the magical realism elements didn't work - more of a personal preference than anything else! And once a ghost started narrating, I struggled to get through the book as for me it took away from the main story which I had found really interesting.

Heartbreaking story of tragic loss, addiction, and a family struggling to survive. This is a book that should be required reading for all high school students.

I loved this book, but found it really difficult to read. This is perhaps why it took me years to actually finish it.

Ward writes such compelling characters, and I was so drawn to Jojo as he navigates the circumstances he's growing up in. I think of this as the road trip from hell, but the power of the book is that so much of what he experiences is common to many - there's nothing that happens here that couldn't happen to any other Black or mixed-race family in America today, and the issues that surround Jojo and his family are unfortunate realities for lots of families.

The inclusion of a ghost that travels with Jojo adds another layer to the story and subtly drives home many elements of the story.

Difficult, thought-provoking, and highly recommended.

I am… going to potentially have some trouble really putting this book into words. I finished it YESTERDAY but I knew that if I waited to review it, it would lose some of its power for me. And it was incredibly powerful, especially in light of the death of beloved actor Chadwick Boseman, whose turn as Black Panther, Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and Thurgood Marshall were groundbreaking and nuanced and just POWERFUL. Rest in power, King, and Wakanda forever. I’ll talk more about that later.

I just. I guess I have to just start talking about it, huh?

In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jojo turns 13 and finds out his father is getting released from prison. His mother, Leonie, is neglectful, a drug addict and incredibly self-centered woman, and he and his little sister, Kayla, live with their mother’s parents, Pop and Mam. Leonie also technically lives there, but she’s gone so often that Jojo doesn’t even call her Mom or Mama – he calls her Leonie. Leonie’s family is poor and black, living in southern Mississippi, near the gulf coast, and Jojo’s father, Michael, is white and from the same small town. And he’s getting released from Parchman several days later. Leonie, her friend from work, Misty, Jojo, and Kayla load up in her old car and make the road trip up north to the prison, and not a thing goes right the entire day.

To add a layer to all of this, Mam and Pop have their own stories to tell. Mam was a healer, using plant-based remedies to help the poor town all throughout her life. But she couldn’t do anything about her own cancer, unfortunately, and at the time the book takes place, she’s bedridden and in terrible pain, dying from the disease. And Pop was a prisoner at Parchman in his own youth, spending several years there before returning to the same small town and falling in love with Mam. And the final, grief-ridden layer to all of this is Given. Given was Leonie’s older brother, lynched by a white classmate while out in the woods hunting. It was covered up by Big Joseph, the town Sheriff (I think? I can’t remember for sure), who stated it was just a hunting accident. And Big Joseph is Michael’s father, who has yet to acknowledge his own grandchildren and doesn’t allow Leonie and the kids into his home.

And this isn’t even mentioning the ghosts. Because this is also a ghost story somehow, in a way that shouldn’t make sense but does.


3 Things I Loved
The writing. Jesmyn Ward deserves her two National Book Awards, god damn. She writes in a way that makes you fall into the words, makes you hold your breath and rocks you to sleep, even in the middle of crippling grief, even when worlds are falling apart in the book. I sometimes dreaded picking this book up, but I kept going because the writing was just so good, and the story is so powerful, and it just needed to be told.
Jojo and Kayla’s relationship. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like this before. Kayla is only two, a toddler, so she can’t form complete sentences yet. But it’s so clear from the words she does say, from her actions, that she prefers Jojo to her own mother, that he comforts her in a way her mother never has. And Jojo literally shields Kayla with his body on more than one occasion, protecting her in every way he can. It’s beautiful.
Pop. There’s something about Pop in this story. His name is actually River, as we learn throughout the story, but the Pop that Jojo talks about, and the Pop that Leonie talks about, they all describe this indomitable spirit, this pillar of surety and strength in the family. He’s human, and he’s flawed, and he has his scars. But he’s the father figure that Jojo and Kayla count on.
Dislikes/Problematic Content
This is incredibly well-written, tackling many, many issues in a nuanced and subtle way. Some content warnings for this book: overt racism, lynching, drug use, abuse, and overdose, terrible/abusive/neglectful parenting, discussion of prison abuse, terrible poverty, and death by cancer. I probably even missed some things. All of these are important to the story, but they definitely have the potential to trigger people.

My only real dislike is super essential to the bones of the story. Leonie. I fucking HATE Leonie. She’s selfish, self-centered, neglectful, and narcissistic. She’s probably one of the worst mothers I’ve read about on the page. But I think we’re supposed to hate her in a lot of ways. I don’t hate her for her drug use, I want to make that very clear. Addiction is a disease. But the rest of her personality is just… she’s the WORST. But like I said, I think it’s part of the bones of the story that we hate Leonie. It makes the rest of the story make sense.

And, as promised, I wanted to touch on the cancer. I don’t know the exact statistics, although I’ve read them many times. But the black population is especially vulnerable to cancer, and cancer kills them more often than it kills people in any other race. This story is no different. Slight spoiler, but we watch Mam die after cancer consumes her entire body and being, and it’s heart-wrenching. Which also circles back to Chadwick Boseman, who was only 43 when he died of colon cancer at the end of last week. FORTY THREE. And he’d been fighting for four years! It all just goes to show that you never know what someone else is going through. But, having lost someone at a very young age to aggressive cancer, get screened, get tested, go to the doctor regularly, do whatever you need to do. Fuck cancer, man.

Rating
A reminder of the rating scale:

Red = DNF, I hated everything
Orange = Ugh, no thank you
Yellow = I mean, I’ve read worse, but there were problems
Green = This was good!
Blue = Oh my gosh, I loved this book!
Purple = This is the unicorn of books and I will be rereading it until the binding falls apart and EVERYONE should be reading it!
How do I even rate this book? It ripped me apart in a lot of ways. It wasn’t happy, and it didn’t have a happy ending. But it was beautiful in its grime, in its darkness. I’m giving Sing, Unburied, Sing a GREEN rating because I have a lot of complicated feelings about it and Leonie is the absolute worst.

Happy reading (and read something happier when you’re done with this one)!

This story is haunting and beautiful. It stuck with me for a long time after reading. I'm not sure that I loved it, but it was memorable.

I really loved this book and I am still thinking about it so long after when I read it, which is an absolute testament to the story. I cannot wait to read more from Jesmyn Ward.

This one was beautifully written, but ultimately hard for me to follow. I know so many people loved it, but I found the supernatural elements to be a tad confusing.

Jasmyn Ward's writing was great, and I was emotionally overwhelmed. The first few chapters I wasn’t sure about the direction of the novel. Then the story completely woke me up, and I was completely engrossed in this family. The story took place in Mississippi. The scene, the spirit of the state is hauntingly represented. Because of the heavy topics, it can be difficult to understand and focus on one thing. Quite frankly, the issues of this family cannot easily be deciphered. It's a story of a complicated family with issues that isn't implausible of some family. The unfixable issues. The issues that some family wants to sweep under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist. Well, read it for yourself. I highly recommend this book.

This was one of the few books that lived up to the hype for me. An absolute masterpiece. I enjoyed it so much that I'm not sure I could do it justice in a lengthy review.

I made the assumption based on some of the early reviews I stumbled across and the synopsis that this would be an enjoyable experience. However, I was not aware this storyline contained magical realism, something I struggle to accept with fiction. While I think that this is probably a fantastic read in the right reader's hands, this just wasn't my cup of tea. I made the decision to set the book aside and move on. Thank you for access to an early copy.