Sing, Unburied, Sing
A Black family road trip through Mississippi, haunted by ghosts. Ward's prose is incantatory, the violence both historical and present, and the novel's use of ghost narrative to confront what American life does to Black families is unlike anything else published in the decade. Her second National Book Award.
The ghosts feel to some readers like a genre they did not sign up for, pulling them out of what otherwise reads as grounded family drama; one puts it plainly: “blame it on the ghosts.” Richie specifically crowds out Jojo’s story, and one reviewer says outright she “wanted to shove them out of the book.” Some find Leonie unlikeable to the point of disengagement, the supernatural material simply “not themes that I connect with or generally enjoy.” A cluster call the interiority given to Jojo and Leonie implausibly literary for their ages, breaking the voice. And the opening goat-slaughtering scene is singled out as a gratuitous first impression.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
