Sing, Unburied, Sing

Ward restages Faulkner's haunted South but puts a Black family at its center instead of its margins: Jojo, thirteen and doing the actual work of parenting his little sister, absorbs his grandfather Pop's stories about Parchman Farm as inheritance, the way Faulkner's sons inherit land and guilt. Leonie is the novel's hardest case — she can see her dead brother Given, but only when high, and she can't see Richie at all, a blindness the book treats as moral rather than supernatural. Care, in this family, doesn't run in a straight line down from parent to child; it detours around Leonie entirely and pools instead in Pop and Mam, and in Jojo himself, still a child and already the one holding everyone else together.

Richie is a ghost of a boy who died decades before Jojo was born, and he attaches himself to the car because Jojo's blood — Pop's grandson — pulls at him; he needs the true story of his own death before he can stop being stranded between worlds. The title's command reframes the whole book as an invocation: a Black Southern cosmology, built from Leonie's crushed-root remedies and the goat Pop guts before the trip, in which the dead don't rest until someone sings them the truth rather than a comforting story. Parchman itself works less as setting than as an open wound in the land — Michael's incarceration and Richie's death, decades apart, happen at the identical coordinates, as if the prison manufactures ghosts on a schedule regardless of what century calls it slavery and what century calls it corrections.

Ward splits narration between Jojo, Leonie, and — increasingly, as the novel goes on — Richie, whose sections let a dead boy's voice carry as much authority as the living. The effect isn't just formal variety; it insists that a thirteen-year-old's plain, watchful sentences and a strung-out mother's self-lacerating ones are equally reliable witnesses to the same history, and that a ghost's testimony about 1940s Parchman belongs in the same book as a contemporary road trip, because for this family it is the same continuous event.