Key themes
- Mississippi as a haunted landscape — the past that will not lie down
- The ghost as the embodiment of historical injustice that has not been addressed
- Love and care amid systemic violence — what survives
About this book
Thirteen-year-old Jojo, his toddler sister and their mother Leonie make a journey across Mississippi to collect Leonie's partner from prison, accompanied by the ghost of a boy who died in Parchman Farm decades earlier. Ward's National Book Award-winning novel weaves together the living and the dead in a meditation on race, grief and the specific inheritance of the American South.
Published in 2017, Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award for Fiction. Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi — the De Lisle of the novel — and has described her fiction as an attempt to reckon with the specific weight of that place's history.
Discussion questions
- Richie's ghost haunts Jojo throughout the novel. What is Ward saying through this ghost — about the history of Parchman Farm, about what Black Americans inherit, about the dead who cannot rest?
- The novel is structured as a road trip but doesn't resolve in the way road trip narratives usually do. How does Ward use and subvert this form?
- Leonie is a complicated mother — loving, addicted, sometimes dangerous. How does Ward develop her without simplifying her — and what does her character say about the systems that create such parenting?
- The landscape of Mississippi is as much a character as any person. How does Ward use place — its beauty and its history of violence — to make her argument?
- Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award. What does it do that earns this recognition — and how does it relate to Ward's earlier Salvage the Bones?
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