Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward **** (of 5)

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a travel log written with the intensity of a stage play. Nearly all the action and poetic-dialogue takes place during an interminable car ride from the south of Mississippi toward the Parchman penitentiary. Leonie, African American (race and pervasive southern racism are central to the story), a mother for the first time when she was 17 is driving. Her son Jojo now 13 is in the back seat caring for three-year-old Kayla who has a stomach virus. In the passenger seat is Leonie's white friend Misty. They are heading to Parchman to retrieve Michael, Leonie's boyfriend, father of her children. Michael is about to be released following three years in prison and his own parents are so angry that he is dating a white woman they have never visited him. The car is hot, sticky, and covered in Kayla's sick. Misty and Leonie are stopping to score a pickup of meth and Jojo is much too quickly reaching adulthood: caring for his baby sister in the shadow of a broken, drug-addicted, heartsick, immature mother. Jesmyn Ward's similes supply a fireworks of imagery that mesmerizes as we squirm in the backseat waiting for peace or redemption for a group of people muddling through poverty, racism, and poor decisions. In short, Leonie, Jojo, and Michael are not so different from us. The presence of two ghosts of recently deceased friends and relatives give the story a kind of African folktale connection between the living and their ancestors, but are, unfortunately, a literary extension that that probably wasn't necessary.