![]() ![]() ![]() Ghosts haunt the pages with the injustices of the past. She weaves in elements of the magical and thereby elevates the novel to the realm of myth. But Ward doesn’t tell a tale merely of scarcity and squalor. With so much fatality, both literal and figurative, flooding the narrative, it would be easy to interpret the novel as a commentary on the deadliness of poverty. And Jojo’s maternal grandmother, whom he calls Mam, suffers from cancer, progressing toward the grave as Sing moves forward. Addiction-that living death-pulses beneath the narration of Leonie, Jojo’s mother. Illness, that hint of the body’s mutability, punctuates the novel’s central journey, a road trip up the state of Mississippi, with Jojo’s little sister, Kayla, carsick and vomiting. In the opening pages, Jojo, one of Sing’s three narrators, helps his grandfather slaughter a goat. The stench of death permeates every page of Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. ![]()
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