Review: 3 stars
'Sing, Unburied, Sing' was the first pick of the 'Now Read This' bookclub. It has also been awarded the National Book Award and appeared in a number of Top 10 Books of 2017 lists. Needless to say, it's been on my to-read list for quite awhile, and I dove into it during a family vacation to Santa Cruz.
The novel is a railroad track with two parallel stories - one involving teenage Jojo, his toddler sister Kayla and a road trip with his mother Leonie to retrieve their father Michael from Parchman penitentiary; the other follows River, Jojo's Pop, and his time own time at Parchman decades earlier. Throughout, these parallel tracks cross, as spirits from the past - Richie, Pop's fellow inmate, and Given, Leonie's deceased brother - assert themselves on the protagonists' reality, insistent on their own agendas.
Ward's writing modulates easily to craft each narrator's unique voice. It is effortless to empathize with Jojo in his role as Kayla's protector from a seemingly deadbeat, drugged-up mother. Similarly, I can easily meld myself into Leonie's conscience, urging her to love her children right, to be more than what circumstances have defined her to be. Ward effectively puts forward her thesis - that the restless souls of so many wronged black men and women are actively invading our present consciousness, influencing the actions of their ancestors generations later. The corpses are buried but their stories of injustice linger, demanding witness and reparation. Each character in the novel perceives these spirits to different extents, but not one is immune to the consequences of these African American lives. This is most poignant during the scene when Jojo and his family are pulled over by a cop, and Jojo, an unarmed black teenager, stares down the barrel of the officer's pistol for no good reason at all. It is a nightmarish history repeating itself again, different scenery, different weapon, same tragedy.
Ward's novel is creative, unflinching and timely given our social struggle with ongoing racism and police brutality, particularly in the U.S. While I felt her novel was highly successful, for some reason, the story was less resonant with me. Perhaps I am not the right reader, in the wrong country. While my opinion and rating of the novel may be debatable, I do feel however that it is an important contribution to the prevailing discussion on racism.