LA LitFans Meetup for March: Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Details
For March, we'll be discussing Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward.
https://amzn.to/48E4KoC.
We hope you are able to join us for a lively discussion. To attend, please RSVP. If you do RSVP then find you're not able to make it, we ask that you update to not attending. No shows will be removed from the group.
From Amazon:
Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century and 10 Best Books of the Year by the NY Times and Winner of the National Book Award.
This majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from Jesmyn Ward is the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi.
Jojo is 13 years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.
His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children’s father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.
When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and the State Penitentiary. There there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.