num_pages: 285
description: In Jesmyn Wards first novel since her National Book Awardwinning Salvage the Bones this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner The Odyssey and the Old Testament Ward gives us an epochal story a journey through Mississippis past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer multiply awarded and universally lauded and in Sing Unburied Sing she is at the height of her powers.Jojo and his toddler sister Kayla live with their grandparents Mam and Pop and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother Leonie on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother which only come to her when shes high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonies children is released from prison she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm the Mississippi State Penitentiary on a journey rife with danger and promise.Sing Unburied Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power and limitations of the bonds of family. Rich with Wards distinctive musical language Sing Unburied Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.
language: English
title: Sing, Unburied, Sing
publisher: Scribner