Kayla is one of JoJo’s points of hope and connection, and in the final pages, the readers are clued in as to how strong their ties are. The narrative is woven with the alternating voices of JoJo and his mother, Leonie, offering different perspectives to what is happening on their journey.Īmid the ugliness and fraught relationships, the pure love between JoJo and his little sister, Kayla, shines through the muck. Like Ward’s other writings, “Sing, Unburied, Sing” is set in Mississippi, and it dwells on Southern black manhood and the social injustices so long imposed on those men. Already, the book has made the short list in fiction for the 2017 National Book Awards. In writing “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Ward faced the pressure of high expectations, considering her last novel, “Salvage the Bones,” won a National Book Award. Ghosts, literal and literary, haunt nearly every page of Sing, Unburied, Sing a novel whose boundaries between the living and the dead shift constantly, like smoke or sand. Along the way, JoJo encounters abuse, death, drug culture, police violence and ghosts.

JoJo is on a road trip with his drug-addicted mother and her similarly addicted friend as well as his toddler sister to Parchman Farm, a Mississippi state penitentiary, to pick up his father, a white man whose family has a dark history with JoJo’s. Hungry and crammed in a stuffy backseat on a long road trip through Mississippi, 13-year-old JoJo experiences the ghosts, both past and present, of America’s long and complicated history of race in Jesmyn Ward’s newest novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu Sing, Unburied, Sing, like Salvage the Bones, has been nominated for the National Book Award, and it’s frankly hard to imagine the award going to a different novel.

Sing unburied sing review