SING, UNBURIED, SING: A NOVEL (audiobook) by Jesmyn Ward

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
Publishers Weekly Top 10 for 2017.
New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017.

Published in 2017 by Simon and Schuster Audio
Read by Kelvin Harrison, Jr. and Chris Chalk and Rutina Wesley
Duration: 8 hours, 22 minutes.
Unabridged.

Jojo lives in rural Mississippi on a small farm, but it is a complicated world. He is bi-racial. His white father (Michael) is in Parchman Farm, officially known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary. His African American mother is a frequent substance abuser and is in and out of his life so much that he and his toddler-aged sister just refer to her by her first name, Leonie. His little sister treats him much more as a parent than Leonie.

He lives with his African American grandparents (his grandmother is dying of cancer) and his white grandparents won't have anything to do with him because they are racists and cannot stand the idea that their son had mixed-race children. To make it all the more complicated, Michael's cousin murdered Leonie's brother and covered it up to be just a hunting accident.

Most of the book deals with the trip to Parchman Farm to pick up Michael on the day of his release. Jojo and his little sister Kayla are forced to go along with Leonie and her friend in addiction, Misty. Jojo's African American grandfather won't go because he served time there as a teenager for a crime he did not do. Plus, he is the only one that can take care of Jojo's grandmother.

The trip is a long one. It shouldn't have been but Leonie is in charge of things. Also, Jojo's little sister Kayla is sick and vomits often. Her "mother" mostly ignores her illness, conducts drug deals along the way and demonstrates her unworthiness as a parent. Once they pick up Michael, he shows that he is a marginally better parent (but that is not too hard).

While at Parchman, Jojo starts to see a ghost who seems to know a lot about grandfather...

This book should have been split into two books. The story of Jojo and his family was interesting, especially the relationship between Jojo and his grandfather. The mystic part of the story was not nearly as interesting as Jojo's life and his grandfather's history. That history could have been told without the introduction of ghosts. For me, it would have been much more effective without them.

What we really ended up here was a long story about Jojo's messy family situation, death and loss and a toddler that vomits all over everyone at one point or another. For me, this was a wasted opportunity.

There were three readers for this audiobook since the story is told from three different points of view: Jojo, Leonie and Richie (a ghost). The parts read for Jojo and Richie were excellently read. But, the parts read by Rutina Welsey for Leonie were excruciating. I will blame this entirely on the producer, not the voice actor. When she read, it sounded like she was pretending to be Eartha Kitt from the 1960's Batman series. Eartha Kitt played Catwoman with a sultry, purring voice. Now imagine a sultry, purring Eartha Kitt reading a text as a parody of Slam Poetry. It was tedious, making an already tedious character unbearable.

So, I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. This book won a ton of awards (some of them are listed above) and I cannot figure out why. For me, this was an uncomfortable mash-up of two different books forced to become one unwieldy mess that doesn't explore either idea to a satisfactory end.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Sing, Unburied, Sing.