Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The central character of this book has no voice and no form. It sits in the background and underground,

like a fetid root system that touches, and rots, everything else in the novel. It is Mississippi's Parchman Prison, the legendary penitentiary that, in effect, kept slavery alive in the Deep South for more than a century after the 13th Amendment. Parchman is a symbol for this racist system, and the book explores the legacy of Jim Crow on both black and white Mississippians.

This novel kept me rapt. I particularly enjoyed reading from the perspective of Jojo, a boy largely raised by his grandparents who has had to grow wise before his time to compensate for his mother's neglect. Jojo is the voice of both his little sister and his grandfather, whose tale of the time he spent at Parchman becomes the central story of the novel. My only complaint was that the voice of his mother, Leonie, who trades off the narration, seemed unrealistic. Her actions -- spiteful, negligent, irresponsible, uncaring -- did not seem consistent with the inner world Ward creates for her. How could someone so thoughtful on the inside be so thoughtless on the outside?

This is a book that was well worth the read.