Sing, Unburied, Sing (Ward) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[Ward's] books reach for the sweep, force and sense of inevitability of the Greek myths, but as translated to the small, mostly poor, mostly black town in Mississippi where she grew up and where she still lives…[Sing, Unburied, Sing] is Ward's most unsparing book…With the supernatural cast to the story, everything feels heightened. The clearest influence is Toni Morrison's Beloved—the child returning from the dead, bitter and wronged and full of questions. The echoes in the language feel like deliberate homage.
Parul Sehgal - New York Times Book Review

The novel is built around an arduous car trip: A black woman and her two children drive to a prison to pick up their white father. Ward cleverly uses that itinerant structure to move this family across the land while keeping them pressed together, hot and irritated. As soon as they leave the relative safety of their backwoods farm, the snares and temptations of the outside world crowd in, threatening to derail their trip or cast them into some fresh ordeal.… The plight of this one family is now tied to intersecting crimes and failings that stretch over decades. Looking out to the yard, Jojo thinks, "The branches are full. They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves." Such is the tree of liberty in this haunted nation.
Washington Post


Staggering…even more expansive and layered [than Salvage the Bones]. A furious brew with hints of Toni Morrison and Homer’s The Odyssey, Ward’s novel hits full stride when Leonie takes her childfren and a friend and hits the road to pick up her children’s father, Michael, from prison. On a real and metaphorical road of secrets and sorrows, the story shifts narrators — from Jojo to Leonie to Richie, a doomed boy from his grandfather’s fractured past — as they crash into both the ghosts that stalk them, as well as the disquieting ways these characters haunt themselves.
Boston Globe


As long as America has novelists such as Jesmyn Ward, it will not lose its soul. Sing, Unburied, Sing, the story of a few days in the lives of a tumultuous Mississippi Gulf Coast family and the histories and ghosts that haunt it, is nothing short of magnificent. Combining stark circumstances with magical realism, it illuminates America’s love-hate tug between the races in a way that we seem incapable of doing anywhere else but in occasional blessed works of art.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


Ward unearths layers of history in gorgeous textured language, ending with an unearthly chord.
BBC


Ward's execution is anything but [familiar]; her first foray into magical realism is downright luminous.
Entertainment Weekly


(Starred review.) [B]eautifully crafted…. When the dead…make their appearances…their stories are deeply affecting, in no small part because of Ward’s brilliant writing and compassionate eye.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Lyrical yet tough, Ward’s distilled language effectively captures the hard lives, fraught relationships, and spiritual depth of her characters.
Library Journal


In her first novel since the National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones (2011), Ward renders richly drawn characters, a strong sense of place, and a distinctive style that is at once down-to-earth and magical.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [A] bold, bright, and sharp-eyed road novel.… As with the best and most meaningful American fiction these days, old truths are recast here in new realities rife with both peril and promise.
Kirkus Reviews