Thank you Net Galley. A fascinating journey through the lives of family living on the edge in a land of extremes. The writing and the plotting are excellent. Jessmyn Ward is a "must read" author.

Stunningly rendered. At the risk of being oxymoronic, sad tale but beautifully written is the most apt description I can give of this novel. Your heart will absolutely ache for Jojo, i.e. Joseph. Jesmyn is certainly at the top of her game with Sing, Unburied, Sing. She sets this novel in the Mississippi Delta, and we have two main narrators Leonie, the young mother and Jojo her thirteen year old son, and a third narrator who leads three chapters and his presence gives explanation to the book’s title, Richie.

Jojo and his little sister Kayla are children of Leonie, who is a drug abusing mother with zero mothering instincts. The three of them live with Mam and Pop, Leonie's parents and the children's grandparents. Jojo is like the surrogate father, as Leonie is often gone and the father, Michael is locked up in the notorious Parchman prison. Kayla reaches to Jojo for succor and nurture much to Leonie's dismay. Jesmyn is great at writing viscerally, and the reader will feel the simmering emotion of Jojo. Jesmyn subtly takes on poverty, racism and drug abuse. We get to experience the drug use along with Leonie. Leonie has hooked up with Michael since high school and he is the white father of her two kids. It was a sense of two broken souls recognizing each other that brought them together.

"Because I wanted Michael’s mouth on me, because from the first moment I saw him walking across the grass to where I sat in the shadow of the school sign, he saw me. Saw past skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm." Michael's parents never approved of the union and didn't meet their grandchildren until JoJo was a teenager and Kayla a toddler as they stopped by their house on the way back from picking up Michael after a three year stint in the prison.

Jesmyn brilliantly uses that actual road trip to take readers on a virtual trip thru the lives of Leonie, Pop and Man, and also Given. Given is the older brother of Leonie who lost his life to one of Michael's cousin's. Leonie often can see and hear Given, she finds these visions comforting especially when she is high. Jesmyn has layered the book on different levels, weaving past present and future in a haunting magnificence. Pop often regales young Jojo with stories about his life and his own stay at Parchman. Pop is struggling in dealing with Mam who is dying of cancer and Jesmyn 's writing around the decay and devastation of cancer and Mam's way of dealing and exiting this life is the phenomenal highlight of a book that has many. The novel moves back and forth in time, eventually coming full circle, and it is mostly through Pop and Jojo's interactions and conversations that this five star tale gets flushed out. Pop has some psychological scars from his time at Parchman and shares with Jojo bits at a time. This adds a bit of suspense to the novel, because readers will want the complete story of what happened. It seems he tells Jojo the same beginning and middle parts of his Parchman stay, but never the ending, well the ending of Pop's story coincides with the denouement of the novel and the book title will be clearly and fully brought to light. An excellent undertaking by Jesmyn Ward. I received an advanced reading copy from Netgalley in exchange for a review. The book will publish Sept. 5, 2017.

What a lovely, lyrical novel! While heartbreaking at times, it speaks of the human condition and the depths of love and grief. When drug-addicted Leonie's white husband is released from prison, she bundles up her son and daughter and they embark on a journey that is both dark and hopeful. Leonie has visions of her dead brother when she's high and son, Jojo cares for little sister, Kayla while on their way to Parchman. While not all the characters are lovable--most are flawed--this is a heartbreakingly beautiful look at family, love, and loss.

Careful now. This one might kick your teeth in when you're not looking, leave you in cold sweats, hoping and praying everyone pulls through. Jesmyn Ward's writing is sharp enough that she does damage before you realize you've been cut; nobody walks away from this one unscathed. A word of warning: the book opens with the butchering of a goat, warm sticky spurts of stuff you might not wanna read about, like peeling flesh and stinking viscera, which is to say Ward sets the tone fast and firm up front, and it's not like it gets any lighter from there. There's a horror behind the everyday that we're supposed to feel as we read. And boy do we end up feeling a lot for these characters.

This is low living, real living, the kind most of us who pick up a book like this have probably never done. But some of us have lived <em>around</em> that kind of real, low living. No money for possessions or gifts, but just enough for drugs. Where everyone knows someone that's dead for a good reason or a bad one, and it doesn't make much difference after the fact. Kids and parents and grandparents sharing beds and floors across generations, collectively in the same shit, fighting the daily battles of a hardscrabble existence.

That's the starting point, and Ward uses a palette of heavy dialect laced with a kind of affected, writerly lyricism to bring it all to life. It's OK that most of these characters wouldn't articulate their thoughts into such clean, evocative poetry because the effect is so pleasing to read, and the narrative, like the title, sings. If the inner monologues feel <em>right</em> but not necessarily <em>true</em>, the dialogue is spot on across the board, rich with a flowing cadence and rural vernacular that exists outside my daily bubble but calls up memories of the small town I left decades ago, where drugs gutted the populace and only a few of us left with our hands clean.

Ward shows us life on the gulf coast of Mississippi because there's a certain kind of truth that makes sense there, and it fits the tale she needs to tell. As much as the book is about race—and it is, with a black mother setting off to meet the white father of her mixed-race kids—it's as much about life in a certain kind of place, and the way demarcations like race and class conspire to push you down even more within that backdrop. Ghosts and spirits overlay the narrative quite a bit more than I expected, casting the events against a backdrop of a modern mythology that could only exist in America. It feels almost biblical, or at least spiritual, like reality overlaid with the ghosts of history to give us a tapestry of pain and survival in the American south. I'll stop trying to capture the tone of Ward's exceptional accomplishment and just suggest you run out and read this for yourself.

I'm blown away by the power and the prose in this novel. This novel sings sorrow like no other book in a long time. Joao and Kayla ache with wanting a better life, and the love they share as siblings is so heartwarming and protective. This kind of writing should be screamed about from the rooftops. It's a marvel and a gem, and is most likely, I hope, a clear winner of all prizes. Bravo indeed. This is fiction of the highest order, and should be required reading for all.

This book is magic on so many levels. From the sentence-level beauty to the overall, heartbreaking story arc. Ward's description of southern poverty and race is so achingly real, so terrible but rich in beauty. What really struck me was the way that their power (magical and non) has been taken from them, erased by an oppressive culture that convinced them their own power was a disease, an impediment. Whether you see it as a metaphor or a truth, there's so much power in this book it radiates like the sun.

What is it about me and the books of Jesmyn Ward? Both Salvage the Bones and now Sing, Unburied, Sing appear to be just the types of books that I would really enjoy. Both books are not just well written but beautifully written, with a deep South setting and ruminations on race and family, love and truth and lots more. For some reason these books do not work for me and I can't figure out why.

The majority of this book takes place on the road. A road trip with a relatively young mother, Leonie her thirteen yr old son, JoJo, her younger daughter Kayla and a friend from work, Misty. They're off on the Mississippi roads to Parchman Prison to pick up Michael, the kids white father. Along the way and back the trip is fraught with family tensions and a very stressful and tense-filled encounter with a racist Mississippi police officer. There's also ghosts or frequent visions of Leonie's deceased brother, Given as well as a young inmate in Parchman, (who was in with Jojo's Paps) and has frequent contact with Jojo. These visions took up more than just a little part of this book and was one big reason that I didn't care too much for it. The best part of this book was the loving relationship between family members particularly Jojo and Kayla amidst the poverty and drug induced stupors of Leonie and a Michael.

I do, indeed, want to enjoy Jesmyn Ward's books. She's frequently lauded by people whose knowledge of books I respect quite a book. However, it would be disingenuous or unfair of me to give a review that's contrary to how I really feel. Quite possibly I'll read her first novel or maybe check to see if she's written short stories or essay's.

Heartbreaking and visceral, Sing, Unburied, Sing is an emotional journey, deep into the South and the roots tangled and burrowing down. This story is a melancholy cacophony of lamentations underneath the simple story of a thirteen-year-old boy and his dysfunctional parents, covering a rather short period of time with the main narrative. This story reaches inside, grabs hold, and pulls you along for its tragic journey.

Ward's writing is a soothing comfort of symphonic words for most of the book. Other books, delivering this amount of prose-laden narration, simply push too far and get swallowed up—increasingly verbose, waxing poetic. Southern books can often fall into that trap of featuring so much atmosphere that they drown in their own oceans of metaphors, similes, and lyrical and heady language, but Sing, Unburied, Sing, beautifully sad and inherently Southern, manages to keep its head above water.

What can i say..this book was a hit. This book was very well written. I love how it focused on the the main characters views and perspectives of the situations at they unfolded. I do not want to provide a spoiler review as this book is yet to be on shelves. Jesmyn Ward did a great job showing spiritual views and where a persons focus should be at any given moment. This is my first review and I hope to have many more. This book will be a hit as her previous work shows she is focused on her path.

Adult responsibility should not consume the life of a thirteen year old. Jojo's family lives in poverty along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Once Jojo had a mama (Leonie) who attended to him and watched TV with him. He stopped calling her mama after she started snorting crushed pills. His father, Michael, is jailed in Parchman farm, The Mississippi State Penitentiary.

Jojo has a dual role as surrogate parent to toddler sister Kayla and as future head of household. He is asked to help grandfather (Pop) slaughter a goat. Grandmother (Mam) is dying of cancer. Jojo simply has too much on his plate.

Upon Michael's impending release from Parchman, Leonie plans a road trip, with kids in tow, to pick him up. Jojo, however, has tried to erase the image of Leonie and Michael's fights. The memory persists and Jojo, with Kayla clinging to him, is an unwilling traveler.

Weaving through the story are ghosts from the past. When Leonie gets high, her dead brother Given appears, providing comfort. Jojo channels the ghost of Richie, a young boy who served time in Parchman with Pop when Pop was wrongly accused of harboring a fugitive. Will Pop tell Jojo the full story of Richie's prison experience and subsequent demise?

A multitude of underlying currents run through this tome. The principals deal with poverty, racial profiling, lack of parenting skills, drug abuse and the supernatural. "Sing, Unburied, Sing" by Jesmyn Ward is a rich, distinctive contribution to American literature.

Thank you Scribner and Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review "Sing, Unburied, Sing".

A dark, but touching story set in Mississippi.

Joseph, Jojo and his 3 year old sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Their mom, who comes and goes, is the drug addicted Leonie who sees visions of her dead brother Given when she's high. His death is haunting. Meanwhile, Mam is dying of cancer and Pop is trying to be a good father to his grandchildren. His stories of life on Parchman farm, a state prison, shows us the horrors he has seen and at the same time, how he never really left.

Throughout, the relationship of Jojo and Pop and Jojo and Kayla give hope that things can be better. It is a rich story, and it really makes you think about privilege and the glue that holds people together. How sometimes, people can only do the best they can with what they are given and how they are able to cope.

I read everything Jesmyn Ward I could get my hands on last year, so when I saw that "Sing, Unburied, Sing" was available on NetGalley (thank you for the advanced copy!) I jumped at the opportunity to dive in. Ward has quickly become my favorite storyteller.

This particular story is filled with family, racism, substance abuse, death, injustice, and ghosts. It is centered in the south―Mississippi, where Ward herself is from and where most of her bodies of work take place. There are three different voices heard: Leonie, her son JoJo, and (from a story inside of a story) Richie, a young boy Leonie's father befriends while he is serving a jail sentence for something he didn't do. JoJo and his younger sister, Kayla, are for the most part raised by their grandparents Pap and Mam. Leonie has bailed on her parental duties, but gives almost 100% towards her relationship to her children's father who, coincidentally, is being released from jail as our story begins.

I love the way "Sing, Unburied, Sing" is intricately weaved with ghosts. When Leonie is escaping reality by getting fucked up, her dead brother Grave joins her. Later, Richie shows up asking a favor of JoJo; he needs to know the details of his own death. Mam knows that those that die an "unexpected" or "violent" death are the lost souls that become ghosts. She wishes more than anything to see for herself and it isn't until her final moments that her children/grandchildren are able to share their "gift."

Ward has a way with words unlike any author I've read. She's honest, real, and her words mean something. I feel for her characters. I can picture them. I know them because they are real people.

I adored Ward's nonfiction books, so when I saw she was writing fiction I almost lost my mind. And for good reason - this book captivated me, wrung out my emotions, and left me thinking about it for the last several days.

Loved this book. The characters were very well developed.. I adored some of them (Jojo, Pop, Kayla, and Mam). Others I intensely disliked. The descriptions in this book were so clear that I could actually see it. I have never read anything by this author before but plan to seek out her other work.

"Sing, Unburied, Sing" presents a way of life that will be unfamiliar to many of its readers. A life in which addiction rules and heartbreak abounds. Jesmyn Ward presents themes and ideas, however, that are as relevant today as they ever have been; racism, injustices in the prison system, police treatment of minorities, and how the past shapes the present. This is the story of a family living in poverty along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.

Through multiple perspectives, Ward tells us the story of Jojo and his toddler sister Kayla who are being raised by their grandparents, Mam and Pop. Jojo's mother, Leoni, is often absent and frequently high. When Leoni gets a call that Michael, Jojo and Kayla's father, is going to be released from prison, she packs the kids up and head's out onto the road to pick him up on his release day. Jojo, who has just turned 13, is less than excited to be reacquainted with the stranger that is his father.

Leoni is haunted by visions of her deceased brother, and Jojo is haunted by a young boy Pop knew in his youth during his time in prison. Ward carries these figures elegantly throughout the story, and they become central to Leoni and Jojo's fates. Ward doesn't hold back in her depiction of prison as slavery, and this storyline comes to a truly heart wrenching and tragic end. This book is wrought with pain and sadness, and I know I will be thinking about Jojo for a while.

This was my first time reading Jesmyn Ward, and I certainly understand her success. She has keen insights and a strong voice, and I am looking forward to reading her backlist.

I could not finish. It is simply not the style of writing I like. I will still suggest others check it out, because it is a good story as far as I read of it at least.

Jesmyn Ward's latest Sing, Unburied, Sing truly sings, a triumphant song at that. It is an assured book that's haunted characters will haunt its reader long after they set the book down. Mournful and sad, it still manages to convey light and hope. A slim book with big ideas, gracefully touches on race (interracial relationships, white privilege, police brutality) , how prison in many ways is slavery with another name, and how the specter of our past tend to linger with us (be that not listening to our mom's sex ed talk, our brother's murder, or simply that persistent reminder of past failings with our children).