Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

In the land near the Mississippi Delta the memories of Jim Crow cast long shadows. Ward tells us a tale of a boy, his sister, their meth addict mother, and their grandparents. To cynically describe this novel as yet-another-tale of a hardscrabble boyhood wouldn't be wrong. But there are ghosts! So that's interesting. 

Rascism is bad, mmmkay? And this novel reads a bit like the 2019 era atonement wave to which it belongs. Both chronologically and in temperment it feels like it belongs on a shelf near "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a book in which we - as a country - and the author are trying to wrestle with our culture history of rascism, particularly in the Deep South. 

Ward's lyricsm is strong, if a bit overwroght often. The dialog rings mostly true, if a little bit too much like a modern grad student trying to capture how po' black folk be talkin' to they family.  The novel got a ton of praise, won awards aplenty, and Miss Ward teaches creative writing at Tulane. 

I worry that my support for the work in this review is sparser than it deserves, but I guess I'm not really sure what this adds to the body of literature on this topic (other than ghosts!) that Alice Walker, Toni Morrison (she got ghosts in Beloved!), and many many others haven't already said. But then, congratulations to Ward - I suppose if you can be mentioned in the same breath as legends like these, bravo!