Her sure hand is a necessity in such a webbed novel, and she expertly pulls the strings as she guides readers over the landscape of real and imagined Mississippi and passes through time. The narration jumps between a variety of characters, living and dead, and though Ward casts her net wider as she moves along, it never unravels. Jojo, who is primarily parented by his grandparents, is the first character the narrative attaches itself to, and his distrust of his drug-addled mother and his responsibility for his family at-once recalls The Grapes of Wrath’s Tom Joad, As I Lay Dying’s Darl Bundren and The Odyssey’s Telemachus. The narrative stirs to life when Leonie, an African American woman in Mississippi, packs her children, 13-year-old Jojo and three-year-old Kayla, and her friend Misty into the car for a drive to their imprisoned white father. Sing, Unburied, Sing, currently a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, functions as a sort of an updated The Grapes of Wrath, as we get to know a family made poor by oppressive forces as they arduously journey along well-worn but remote American roads. Ward’s poetic prose and her use of spiritual themes and Southern settings have earned her too-easy comparisons to Toni Morrison, but Ward’s new novel, while unique, more directly evokes predecessors like Faulkner, Steinbeck and even Homer.

Jesmyn Ward’s previous novel, Salvage the Bones, won the 2011 National Book Award, and the Mississippi-born author more than matches her previous work with her new novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is thematically similar but more wide-reaching and braver than anything she’s done before.

Sing unburied sing review