Thirteen-year-old Jojo lives with his grandparents and toddler sister on the Mississippi Gulf Coast while his mother, Leonie, struggles with drug addiction and grief. When Jojo’s white father is released from Parchman Farm, a notorious state penitentiary, the family drives north to collect him. During this transit, the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Jojo and Leonie, while introducing the ghost of Richie, a boy who died at the prison decades earlier. The story examines how racial violence and historical incarceration shape the physical and spectral reality of a modern Black family.
Readers interested in the intersection of Southern Gothic traditions and contemporary American politics find a stark depiction of how systemic poverty and the carceral state impact domestic life. The text serves those looking for a rigorous analysis of cross-generational trauma and the specific ways unaddressed history manifests as haunting. The reader walks away with a concrete understanding of how the legal and social structures of the Jim Crow South persist in the bodies and spirits of the present.
Deep, inward-looking, contemplative and thought-provoking; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Wisdom Collector. Which reader are you?
Insights from Sing, Unburied, Sing
“She eats until she is full.”
Love and hate look exactly the same when Leonie looks at Jojo. She resents him for being a reminder of everything she lost.
“The sky is the color of a bruised plum.”
The Mississippi mud feels like it's full of bodies. The land remembers every act of violence even when the people try to forget.
“Sing, unburied, sing.”
Some wounds never close. They just turn into ghosts that follow you home and sit in the backseat on long drives.
“I like to think I know what death is.”
Living people can be more terrifying than ghosts. Leonie is so lost in her own grief that she barely sees her kids.
- Published
- 2017
- Publisher
- Scribner
- ISBN
- 9781501126062
- Language
- EN
