I received this ARC from netgalley.com in exchange for a review.

I just couldn't get a grasp on this story. DNF. Abandoned at 20%, no rating.

This story did not resonate with me as much as I hoped it would. The writing is good, and the different points of view is also good; it worked well. Characters were rounded, full-formed, but I can't say I particularly liked any of them. Not even Riv. And the story itself, I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Great read!
Children should be able to be children without having to take on the responsibilities of adults. Unfortunately, like JoJo that is not the case for many.
This book serves as a reminder of the emotional hardships numerous children endure. I highly recommend!!
Thanks to Netgalley and Scribner

Beautifully written to the core, exquisite understanding of the human nature, a book set up to become one of the best of 2017. 

I was amazed by the writing style, this being my first Jesmyn Ward book. There is a melodious ache in her words, deeply resounding and immediately compelling, comforting yet fantastic in a way. I would most likely buy the hardcopy and reread entire passages. I made so many notes on my kindle, so many beautiful phrases to treasure.

The characters​ in this book are going through complex struggles, psychologically and physically too. Jojo is my favorite and I felt so deeply with this boy, too mature for his years. I could not imagine being in his shoes, seeing and going through so much hardships and yet shouldering huge responsibility towards his toddler sister. His savior and role model is his grandpa, Pop. This just goes to show how important having a firm role model is to young kids.

 Leonie is a wreck of a mother, I was engrossed by all her actions and way of thinking. I could not fathom her becoming who she was in the book. Her character is nevertheless well rounded descriptively and realistic. 

I highly recommend this book to everyone who likes sublime writing about real life hardships. The message I manage to feel is that there is a glimmer of hope usually between the darkness of what life can be. 

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
My review is scheduled to be published on my blog on August 23rd, 2017. Subsequently I will publish it on Amazon, Goodreads and Instagram too.

This story is told from several different viewpoints but the most resounding voice was a young boy named Jojo. Jojo lives with his Mam and Pop and younger sister Kayla. His mom Leonie pops in and out of the house when she isn't drugged out of her mind. Jojo looks at life through an old man's eyes even though he hasn't even reached puberty. (Not literally for you trolls)..but this kid has seen more than most of us even have nightmares about.
His father is about to be released from the state penitentiary so Leonie loads up the kids along with a friend to go pick him up. Normally I love road trip stories but in this one I knew I didn't really want to tag along but this book had me completely wrapped around it's finger by then and I couldn't stop. So road trip it was.

I cannot start to describe the writing for this book. It was powerful and completely swept me into the story. You can see Jojo's world come to life. The author shows racism and hopelessness in a way that made me ashamed of the way the world was and can still be. Not everyone is cut out to be a parent and not everyone can even mange to be a decent human.

I will admit to getting a bit side tracked when the book added in some woo-woo stuff.

But the author slapped it around and made it all tie right back into the story.

This was my first Jesmyn Ward book (not my last) and she reminds me strongly of Toni Morrison except for the fact that I actually like Ward's writing.

Booksource: Netgalley in exchange for review.

Great novel. I loved the special bond between the grandfather and his grandson.

I don't think I can do justice to this beautiful, heartbreaking novel. This is my first novel by Jesmyn Ward but it definitely won't be my last, and I agree with other reviewers that her writing is comparable with Toni Morrison. The sorrow-filled story about Pop, Mam, their meth-addicted daughter Leonie, and her kids Jojo and Kayla touched me in so many ways. The love and care between Jojo and Kayla and the absence thereof from their mom is something that will stay with me for the longest of times. I wanted to hate Leonie, but couldn't - she may not be able to love her kids, but her feelings for her dying mother are real. The author adds another element to the story with the fact that Leonie and Jojo are haunted by her brother (Leonie) and a young boy Pop knew while incarcerated (Jojo). Jojo's visions of Richie is achingly beautiful, and reminded me of The Enchanted because of it's almost dreamlike quality. Sing, Unburied, Sing will take your heart and break it in a million pieces, but it will be worth it.
I think Anne Patchett says it best: “The connection between the injustices of the past and the desperation of present are clearly drawn in Sing, Unburied, Sing, a book that charts the lines between the living and the dead, the loving and the broken. ”
*ARC FROM NETGALLEY

This story is a paradox. One facet shows the love between Pop (grandfather) and Jojo (grandson) as well as between Jojo and his sister, Kayla. But the other side of the coin is the lack of love between Leonie and her father, Pop, or her kids, Jojo and Kayla.

The characters are extremely well developed. Some I would be happy to know and felt I did. Others, not so much. How the author could so effectively develop each character and his/her unique personality is impressive.

It’s the story of poor black people and poor white people. Leonie, who is black, is married to Michael, who is white. Narrated by different characters in different chapters are stories of interracial problems, drug abuse, terrible treatment, and more.

Some of the characters ‘hear’ the thoughts of animals, and some can see dead people. This may sound implausible, but it is a very innovative addition to the story. Well one, Ms. Ward, well done. You have an intriguing imagination.

This book is like nothing I’ve ever read before, and I loved it. I recommend it to all my reading friends.
Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this fascinating tale. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This brilliant novel reads like a thriller yet teases out and lays bare a disturbing family history of violent, unresolved death resulting from a culture of race relations profoundly at odds with national ideals.

Jesmyn Ward is a Southern writer in the gothic tradition, a worthy successor to Faulkner, O’Connor, Welty, and McCullers. To my mind, Ward shows the cruelties not just within families but between families and races. The characters she gives us have so much at stake. What Ward writes is what we have inherited. We can change it, but first we have to acknowledge it.

The bulk of this novel takes place over the course of one day, the day Jojo and his sister Kayla accompany his mother Leonie to Parchman’s, a prison, to pick up his father Michael. Everything is revealed in that one day. Resolution takes a little longer.

Ward’s willingness to “go there,” her vision uncut and her language clear and exact, gives her work the aspect of witness. And yet she inhabits the young man Jojo so completely that he became our eyes and our judgment. It feels like a gift, to be able to see how families bend and break under the weight of all they carry…the weight of all those killed violently and not yet laid to rest.

“Last night, Richie crawled under the house and sang.”

Richie is the ghost of a poor murdered boy, and he is not the only ghost in this family’s present. Jojo’s uncle Given is also a spirit, albeit one that gives comfort, advice, and warning. It proves difficult for family members to deal with the spiritual needs of the ghosts as well as the temporal needs of those around them. It is confusing, demanding, intrusive. Add to that, not everyone has “the sight.” Jojo has it.

Ward opens her story with the butchering of a goat, giving us a taste of the education Jojo has on the farm, under the tutelage of his grandfather. The violence of the experience jolts us awake, nerve endings jangling. We need whatever instincts this incident has aroused in us to get through the day trip to Parchman’s, which becomes a descent into the dark heart of delusion and destruction.

Ward manages to instill the work with the impetus of a thriller: a reader becomes completely trapped by the closeness in the old car, the desultory conversation, the turn onto unfamiliar roads, the unexpected stop. The blood scent has put the wind up: we’re not sure who will come out alive at the end of the trip. Ward exquisitely calibrates her descriptions to resonate with us: we recognize these people, these motivations, these zones of danger.

Making an exciting work of fiction is an art, but Ward elevates the stakes by making an exciting work of fiction socially relevant and critical to the conversation going on in our nation. Just last summer a book of essays edited by Jesmyn Ward and written by important American writers and thinkers, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, was released to great acclaim. The essays address the ongoing race issues our country has never resolved and struggles with yet.

Ward is among the finest and most important writers we have. Make sure you catch everything she puts out.

A thoughtful and touching book. The story really began to gear up when they started their car trip from hell. I could smell the vomit and feel the nausea and heat and my heart was in my throat during their encounter with the police. I really couldn't put the book down at that point. Jojo was a wonderful character and Leonie was a very intriguing character, but for some reason, Pop was my favorite. I felt such a strong affection for him. Thank you for a fine novel.

If I didn't know who'd written this book, I would have guessed it was a long-term powerhouse like Toni Morrison or Alice Walker. Amazing. Jessmyn Ward is a talent to be reckoned with.

”The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit,
But during its moment, all that is remembered
joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past
and the present, the living and the dead.”
One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty

Thirteen year-old JoJo and his younger sister Kayla live with Pop and Mam, his mother’s parents. Big Joseph and is their other grandpa, Michael is their son, and JoJo and Kayla’s father. Leonie, their mother, JoJo and Kayla have lived with her parents for three years, since the day the police took Michael away, before Kayla was even born. Soon, though, Michael will be getting out of Parchman, Mississippi’s State Penitentiary.

Mam is losing her lengthy battle with cancer, these days she’s bedridden, and life is far from easy for this family. The only one seemingly staying in one place is Mam, but even she is transitioning, dreaming of emerging from this confining cocoon of life and becoming free of the pain and suffering.

Pop has his stories that haunt him of his days at Parchman when he was a boy two years older than JoJo is now. He wasn’t the youngest, though, that would be Richie. Richie was twelve. Pop’s dreams tend to take him into the past, sometimes revisiting his days at Parchman, his life since those days.

There’s a journey to drive and pick up Michael upon his release from prison, but the journey is more than a physical one, more than just the drive there and back. There’s Michael’s journey from being an inmate to being free, a mental transition as much, if not more, than a physical one. From prisoner back to husband and father, including a daughter who doesn’t know him. A journey from the past to the present.

There’s a gentle sense of spirituality in this story, weaving in and out of the tale are ghosts of the past hovering, flitting in and out of the story. There are also the ugly tales of dark days, slavery, and the kidnappings that slavery was built upon. Racial tensions. Generational, never-ending poverty. Deprivations. Prejudice. Regret.

And then there’s tales of love. Of hopes and dreams. Of believing in something more than what is. Of opening our heart, mind and eyes to see beyond.

Having never read Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, for which she won a National Book Award, Where the Line Bleeds or Men We Reaped, my only acquaintance with her was reading the collection of essays in The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, for which she was editor. I was not prepared for how thoroughly I would be immersed in this story, or how this feels, beautifully crafted with an immense sense of love and caring for each person. This felt like a living place and these people like they lived and breathed, laughed and cried. When I was in the woods behind Pop’s house with JoJo, I could visualize it all, and when I stood beside Mam, I saw it all, felt everything.

Ultimately, this is an ode to that place where we can find that feeling we may search for our whole lives. That place where we feel we belong, where we are accepted, welcomed, where we can be ourselves. What our hearts see as Home, where we can become ”part of the song.”

Recommended.


Pub Date: 05 Sept 2017

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Scribner.

This book is heartrending and beautifully written. The story of a biracial thirteen year old boy, who is being primarily raised by his black, maternal grandparents, and essentially is raising his younger sister. There are multiple tales within tales: a road trip to retrieve his father from prison, crystal meth, pervasive racism in the past and present South, family love--both everlasting and imperfect, mothering and nurturing--both despite of hardships and the inherent lack of it, and ghosts. Jojo, the central figure is coming of age and becoming aware of the facts about his uncle's death and his beloved grandfather's experience in prison. His true mother, his grandmother, is dying. His biological mother has come back into his life. Jojo is endangered on many fronts--uncaring adults, racist society, supernatural. His love for his sister and grandparents and his bravery are unwavering. The writing is lyrical, the story is compelling and the book leaves a lasting impact. There is horror, love, bravery and cowardice. It's an important book and left an indelible impression.

i'm by no means a connoisseur of contemporary african american literature, but, of the authors i've read, jesmyn ward seems to me the best in bringing us close to an understanding of the absolute tragedy that was slavery, and, in james baldwin's words, of the fact that "americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be." the flip side of baldwin's statement is that black americans are a deeply injured people, and we are way too close to the long, long time during which this injury was inflicted to get even a glimpse of its devastating power. even just to say the words "post-racial" is sacrilegious.

for this reason alone, jesmyn ward must be read by all white people. i don't know about black people because i'm not black, but white people must read this book and try to understand as much as they can what it means to carry the worst trauma history can inflict.

this book is about black people and white people. it is set in contemporary mississippi, but there are flashbacks to the 1950s. look, this is not harder to read than, say, The Underground Railroad. in some ways, it's easier. there is a road trip and if you are a sucker for road trip stories, this is a good one. there are ghosts, so if you are a sucker for ghosts this is for you. there are also a lot of unnecessary adjectives, and the prose is less sparse and clean than the prose in Salvage the Bones, which was pretty much perfect. there are dogs. jesmyn ward has a thing for dogs. the dogs in this book, just like the dogs in Salvage the Bones, are not nice, but they don't hurt anyone. still, the book's protagonist, a young teenage boy, is afraid of the dogs. dogs were used and are still used by white people to scare and hurt black people. there is a reason why jesmyn ward's characters are afraid of dogs.

but there is also hope. just like in Salvage the Bones it is not easy hope. it's transcendent hope that is rooted in religion, christian and african, and spirituality, and it is hope that, heartbreakingly, gives strength to endure. just like in Salvage the Bones, there are siblings who really, really love each other, and i am as much a sucker for young siblings who love the heck out of each other as i am of road-trip books, so this worked for me.

i read an advanced copy of this book thanks to netgalley (many thanks), so maybe by the time this reaches you someone will have cleaned up the excessive adjectives and the book will be perfect. regardless, you should read it, because you, like me, need to be reminded, as often as possible, that we are unlike any other people in the world.

I listened to the audiobook of "Salvage the Bones", a couple of months ago. I was so engrossed, it was almost hard to distinguish one talent from the other: the narrators voice or the authors writing. Jesmyn Ward was a new author to me.
I remember cringed at times - and thought the language was beautiful.

NO SPOILERS
.....many other reviews came before me - excellent ones describing the plot and sharing about the characters. I read Michael's review which had me running to find this book on Netgalley. I didn't even know a new release was coming out.
His review is wonderful. I recommend reading his review- its terrific!

I tried to write this review from mostly my thoughts and feelings about it AS A WHOLE...which is why I don't go into each character too much. I'm sure, though that this story and these characters and many of the scenes will stay with me for a long time.

I enjoyed 'reading' Jesmyn's writing very much. ( no audiobook this time). Page after page -- there is wonderful prose. I love how the story begins.......
"I like to think I know what death is. I like to think it's something I could look at straight. When Pop tell me he need my help and I see that black knife slid into the belt of his pants, I leave Mam sleep in her bed and my little sister Kayla sleep on a blanket on the floor, and I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger; that's how Pop walks".

Jesmyn is a magnificent writer, and storyteller. Although an easy storyline to follow itself - I spent extra time thinking about the individual characters. Visually pictures were solid in my brain.
Each one of characters were dealing with transition- change - suffering -and other losses.
Each character in this novel had to confront the curves life threw at them - be it illness - drugs - poverty - racial inequity - massive disappointments - fears - regret - abuse -
narcissistic illusional protection - and other realities every human being would prefer to avoid.

Morning breakfast anyone?
Cold goat for breakfast with gravy and rice .. was cooked in a pot that Pop tells Jojo...is leaking cancer into the food because the enamel on the inside is peeling off like paint. Isn't this the way you start your day? And greet your kids with news of their first morning meal? Yeah.... thought so!

Kidding aside-- about the breakfast...... there's a great deal of sadness in this novel
but WE FACE OUR THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS WITH GRACE..... because Jasmyn Ward is skilled in opening up our hearts and mind -- to take a deeper look at some very serious issues --without leaving us ( the readers) to bleed to death either. Jasmyn has crafted an important path to understanding more about ourselves - the world we live in -and the nature of reality ....a touch of spiritualistic mythology.

Thank You Scribner, Netgalley, and Jesmyn Ward... ( you have me wanting to read your other books)!!!

A moving story, following a link through the ages of a family; its hardships, successes and heart-breaks. Really absorbing and emotional, you really feel for all the characters in their own way. Really recommend.

This is a story you need to digest a while after you read it. It has some elements of magical realism that may or may not be metaphorical, and the story it tells is so complexly layered that it is sometimes hard to decipher. But it is worth the journey.

The story takes place on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where the bloody ghosts of its Jim Crow racist past are never hidden far below the surface.

Leonie is a young African-American drug-addicted mother with two children, Jojo (age 13) and his sister Kayla (3), whom she mostly leaves in the care of her own parents, Mam and Pop. Mam is dying of cancer, so Pop and Jojo carry most of the load of running the house and raising Kayla. The story is narrated in turn from multiple perspectives.

Parchman State Penitentiary is a character in this story also. Pop was sent there for five years when he was fifteen, and the trauma he experienced there has haunted him ever since. Leonie’s white boyfriend Michael (who is also the father of her two children) is in Parchman as the story begins, but is about to be released.

[In real life, Parchman had been notorious for many years for being run like a slave plantation, with inmates suffering murders, rapes, beatings and other abuses. In 1972, four Parchman inmates brought a suit against the prison superintendent in federal district court alleging their civil rights under the United States Constitution were being violated by the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment. The federal judge found for the plaintiffs, and reforms were subsequently instituted. But reports of abuses and corruption have continued to plague the prison, albeit across the color line now. As Michael wrote to Leonie: “This ain’t no place for no man. Black or White. Don’t make no difference. This is a place for the dead.”]

Leonie insists the kids ride with her to Parchman to pick up their father. She also brings along her white friend Misty, a fellow drug-addict who also has a boyfriend in Parchman. (Misty’s boyfriend is black, and “this loving across color lines was one of the reasons we became friends so quickly.”). Misty is Leonie’s only friend.

When Leonie is high, she sees her dead older brother Given, who was killed fifteen years ago by Michael’s racist cousin. In fact, Michael’s whole family consists of rabid racists, and his parents won’t even acknowledge their half-black grandchildren.

Leonie can only see the dead with drugs, but Jojo and Kayla have the “gift” of hearing voices and seeing the dead at any time. Jojo is a bit worried that when Mam dies he will see her as a ghost. She tells Jojo she thinks not; rather, she will be “on the other side of the door. With everybody else that’s gone before.”

But Jojo has reason to worry; he is troubled by a ghost named Richie, who came back with them from Parchman. Richie was only 12 when he was in prison there, at the same time that Pop (whose name is River) was there. Pop has told Jojo stories about Richie, but never about what happened to him and how he died. Richie asks Jojo to find out, because River can’t hear him like Jojo can, and Richie needs to know; he thinks if he does, he will hear the song that will free him from this half-way existence and let him move on to the afterlife. (Is the song one of love for those who died? Justice? Change in the South? It’s unclear to me.)

And Richie is not alone in his situation. “‘There’s so many,’ Richie says. . . ‘So many of us..’ ‘Stuck. So many crying loose. Lost.’” The stuck ones are those that suffered unjustly and died violently; those that were lynched, tortured, murdered - they are all waiting, in sorrow and pain, to hear the song to send them on.

Whether Jojo can help him find the song drives the narrative, as do the ties of family and love that can see us through the worst of times.

Evaluation: There are characters who act badly, and yet most of them elicit sympathy. Others, like Michael’s extended family, are horrific, but they are not portrayed unrealistically; unfortunately, they still exist.

This story is haunting in two senses. One is its inclusion of ghosts, although this is definitely not a “paranormal” story; they can be seen as narrative devices, and/or as metaphors. The other is that the story and characters and what they endured will stay in your mind long after you finish reading.

This book raises some thorny issues that would make it an excellent choice for book clubs.

4.5 stars, I'll round to 5. The characterization in this book is super strong. The characters all felt like flesh and blood breathing to me. I loved the interplay in narration between JoJo, the young boy who had to grow up too fast, and Leonie, his mother who still hasn't quite grown up. I loved seeing their relationship and how they relate to others in a multigenerational household. The prose is haunting. It is not an easy book to read subject-wise, but Ward makes it hard for you to look away and wraps you tight around members of the family.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Such an incredibly prolific novel! Jesmyn Ward takes us on a journey with this family through racial adversity. Exceptional character development made this brilliant story heartbreaking!