My rating is very complex on this book, so please don't pay attention to stars. I rated it three out of five because the Goodreads label of "I liked it" seemed to fit best. Well, as much as anyone can like a book of this sort of magnitude and weight.

I have yet be able to feel at home in the genre of magical realism. I do not particularly enjoy it. I've tried the genre from multiple cultural perspectives, and although I do like the cultural emersion it can bring, magical realism is just not the way that I absorb story. Magical realism tends to roll over me instead of through me, which is how I want stories like this to impact me. I want them to punch me in the gut, and this one did, but the magical realism was still a block for me.

With that said, it is NOT that way for most people. So PLEASE, do not let a solid three of five star rating from me convince you not the read this book. Actually, I don't know if I've ever rated a book in this genre so high. This is a powerful book. Those with cultural backgrounds similar to mine need to be reading books on these topics with the level of graphic descriptions this book contains.

Sing, Unburied, Sing follows the story of an impoverished Mississippi family's struggle.

From the back of the book: "
Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise."

I liked the idea of Leonie's brother appearing to her. It was the other ghost character, Richie, who I often found unnecessarily confusing along the way. I do feel like what Richie's character revealed could have been revealed without Richie himself, or that he could have been something more powerful and less strange in the end scenes. The group of spirits at the end did serve a powerful purpose in revealing how many stories cannot be told, will never be told, and how those spirits don't really rest. I also wanted Jojo to have the final moment, and feel that although Kayla made some sense, it wasn't as cohesive with her. So it's not the ghosts I find a little off putting, but some of their execution.

I definitely want to read more by this author. Her lyrical prose put her with the literary greats. She is an artist who paints with words and I marveled at so many of her metaphors and her ability to deeply disgust the reader with the sheer physicality of life and death the truth of violent situations.