A Bit Bookish

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book about an African American family challenged with dissolution has been receiving a lot of attention and garnering lots of acclamation in book circles recently. Told from several different perspectives, a young black woman and her two children drive to a prison to pick up their white father--Parchman prison, the oldest prison in Mississippi, which represented institutional racism for many years. The 13 year old boy has been raised by his grandparents (who he idolizes) and has a dislike and distrust of his erratic mother. The care of his 3 year old sister has fallen largely to him. The tension between her and her son runs throughout the novel. Her failings are aggravated by addiction and grief, and she risks her children's safety repeatedly as the novel progresses. There is also a supernatural element involving a pair of restless ghosts. Jesmyn Ward is the first woman to have won two National Book Awards, and the first person in her family to have graduated college. This site doesn't let you use half stars, or I probably would have rated this book 4-1/2 stars. It is beautifully written with great lyricism and also painful and heart breaking too. The intimacy in this family portrait is so vivid. You feel the struggle and violence and despair so intensely as it examines ugly truths in their lives--and yet you also feel the strength as well as the limitations of family bonds. Profoundly moving, poetic and haunting. You won't be able to forget it anytime soon.


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