Sing, Unburied, Sing is Jesmyn Ward’s latest award-winning novel centered around poverty in the American South. Filled to the brim with the living ghosts of a not so dead past, Ward navigates the lines of family, race, and love, surprising readers with the brutally honest portrayal of a family divided. Wrapped up in Ward’s classic lyrical style, Sing, Unburied, Sing tackles these themes in a new way, a deep pain made accessible for every reader.

I always find it hard to rate novels I read for courses at university because I find I read them in a very different manner than when I’m reading as a hobby. That’s why you’ll never find a review for classics such as Wuthering Heights or modern literary fiction like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The mindset I’m reading in is more analytic, more critical, and I usually miss the opportunities to form a bond with the characters and judge a book on its entertainment merits. Sing, Unburied, Sing, while close to that mindset, deviates in the sense that the course I was reading it for wasn’t strictly academic. The focus of the reading was to find the marketable traits of the book, find what other readers can find in this book, a mindset that falls quite in line with my reviewing mindset.

However, Sing, Unburied, Sing is still a very hard book to rate based on the content alone. This is a novel centered heavily in pain and little in growth, and without Ward’s writing, the book would have been all doom and gloom. While there are small moments of redemption, the focus of the novel is still rooted in pain and in grief, emotions that I have never experienced on the level this book deals with. It made it hard to relate, but I still enjoyed the novel overall. Reading about experiences so different from my own always has its upsides, and I did know the darkness I was heading into beforehand.

This is a book that draws out discussion, especially around the characters. Most are posited on the line between good and evil, most of them carrying the guilt of this positioning along with them. Ward has created a large cast of complex characters, none of which you can wholeheartedly like but none you can fully hate either. It creates an interesting reading experience that keeps the reader on the fence and focused, constantly trying to pass a final judgment on the characters but never being able to.

The themes of the novel are also varied and full of depth, from the racism present in the biracial coupling/family of Leonie and Michael to the comments on the prison system of the US. This is a very political novel even if Ward never comes out and announces her opinion, only shows the truth through the eyes of the characters that have lived it. It is a novel full of layers, the heart of the novel hiding somewhere among all of them.

Lastly, this novel delves quite deeply into the idea of magical realism, using ghosts and an underlying sense of magic in the family to strengthen and deepen the themes and characters shown above. The ghosts are there to bring the past alive, to comment on the continuity of some issues as well as the continuity of some characters. There’s also a sense of magic and “witchcraft” in the matriarchy of Leonie’s family, one that seems to end with her. While this is never fully developed or explained, it exists enough for the reader to draw something extra from it, for it to contribute something, however small, to the novel overall.

All in all, I’m not going to say this was an enjoyable read. It was a painful one, an honest one, one that attempted to describe the depth of human experience and pain using lyrical language and magic. However, I can safely say that it is extremely deserving of the awards and prestige it has garnered, and I am not surprised at all that Ward won the National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017.