Often while I was reading Sing, Unburied, Sing, I had to hush my inner critic. Yes, Jesmyn Ward weaves some wonderful scenes and vivid sentences, but she really isn’t doing anything new. Yes, that climax is gut-wrenchingly affective, but it really isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before. It’s almost too easy to dismiss Sing, Unburied, Sing as just another book about a tormented family surviving racial injustice in the South, a setting that tends to invite ghosts (of which there are plenty here.) It’s easy to say that the narrative is nothing original and that the conclusion was powerful, but trite. Yes, I can just say, Jesmyn Ward isn’t doing anything new—she’s just carrying on the various traditions of Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, John Steinbeck… Or I can say, “Damn, Jesmyn Ward is carrying on the tradition of Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison…John Steinbeck, and she’s doing a fabulous job of it!”

With writing most often described as lyrical and lush, Ward's elegiac prose eases you gently into harsher truths. Having read Salvage the Bones, I was happy to see this new title offered on NetGalley, especially with that amazing cover. But despite the fact that I got the kindle version, I decided to listen to the audiobook, which added an AudioFile award to the many others this book has garnered, including the National Book Award for Fiction. This is a powerful, deeply moving story, combining the gritty underside of life with the ethereal world of those who have left but refuse to be forgotten. Compelling and truly a wonder, as you might expect.

A realistic book where ride-hopping ghosts feel as natural as a toddler vomiting on a long trip is a feat of nature. It simply should not be possible, but Jesmyn Ward achieves it with ease in SING, UNBURIED, SING.

And can we just talk about that title? Everything about this book is pitch perfect. I rarely read anything that doesn't stop me at some point to notice that I'm reading. It's one of the horrors of growing up. I used to read everything by just diving in and living in that world for the length of the book. Nowadays, I notice far too often that this is a book. It's either overly clever or overly wordy or overly cute or overly bad or something along the way. That didn't happen here. I didn't notice anything but a story I got sucked into and read voraciously from the first page to the end.

There are plenty of great reviews by people who know better than me why this is a good book. I am not going to pretend to know. I just know this is a book I felt intensely and lived inside while I read it.

Every scene is impeccable like a well-preserved antique: not in a bright shiny way - just in a refined way, sort of soft and easy, no matter the subject matter. (Maybe this is what "lyrical" means.) Given the subject matter of parental drug use, a son who has taken the world on his shoulders, race relations, the worst prison in the country, family dynamics, poverty, cancer... Those things are not usually written with agility. They are often "important," but not usually graceful. SING, UNBURIED, SING is. There's a light but purposeful touch.

This is a book -- and they seem to come along only rarely -- that reminds me exactly why it is so vital, life-affirming and essential to read.

”I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.”

I remember Hurricane Katrina. Having lived in the south all my life, I’ve borne witness to many a tornado, tropical storm, and hurricane. Nothing quite compares to Katrina—its depth, its width. I live in northern Alabama and my people were still hit hard by her. My family spent a few days and nights in the basement of our church, with friends, sleeping on cots and passing the time playing ping-pong. For me, being a child of nine at the time, it was an experience of pure, unadulterated fear mixed with excitement stemming from the strangeness of staying away from home for that length of time. We survived the storm with our homes and lives intact, though our neighbors in Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas were not so lucky.

If Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing is a tropical storm, Salvage the Bones is a category five hurricane. It is a force to be reckoned with; it is awesome in the purest sense of the word. Though it is a deeply southern work, Ward’s honed storytelling abilities allow this brutal, gritty examination of a family in Mississippi preparing for the storm of their lives to maintain a sense of accessibility, and home-spun charm.

A deeply poetic, painful, and crystal-clear story of motherhood and loss set in the sweltering heat of an oncoming southern storm, I could not put this book down and feel I’ll have reader’s hangover for some time to come. Is it too early to have a book of the year?

Oh, this book.

I didn’t really have much of an idea of what to expect going into this one, and I’m glad. This is a story of family, and heritage, and ghosts, and racism, and growing up, and the bad things that happen to us, all of us — told in illuminate, sparkling prose. Sing, Unburied, Sing reads like poetry.

This is the story of JoJo, a newly thirteen year old boy, and his mother — a woman preoccupied by her addictions and ghosts of the past — and their various other family members. An exploration of life and death, Jasmyn Ward’s storytelling ability is sharp as a tac, refined to perfection. From an editing standpoint, this novel has been whittled down to the bare essentials: nothing more or less is needed.

To say too much about this one is to risk spoiling it, or at least failing to do it justice. I don’t think this will be my favorite book of the year, but it’s up there. And this is an author I will be looking into in the future. Worth all the hype.