This award-winning portrait of a Mississippi family blighted by drugs and prison is a fierce critique of US historySing,Unburied, Sing begins as it mostly means to move on: in blackness. A teenager named Jojo finds himself in a place of dirt and mud and slime and blood. His grandfather is showing him how to slay a goat: how to slit its throat, or how to slice its stomach and reach in for its intestines. There are terrible bleating and gurgling sounds. The smell overwhelms like a faceful of pig shit”. Buzzards hover above. Soon the youngster is throwing up in the grass. Not much later he’ll be eating the goat’s liver in a plate full of gravy.
If this sounds apocalyptic,it’s representing the gradual apocalypse being experienced by black America. Jesmyn Ward’s gnarly, freighted novel is a portrait of a broken family living on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. This family is headed by Leonie, or a mother at 17,hooked on drugs, married to a white man named Michael whose cousin killed her brother and who is himself completing a jail sentence. Their son Jojo acts as a bridge between grandparents Pop and Mama (the former afflicted by memories; the latter dying of cancer) and his toddler sister.
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Source: guardian.co.uk