To me, Sing, Unburied, Sing feels like two separate stories. One is the advertised tale of Jojo coming of age with a black drug-abusing mother and a white just-out-of-jail father. Jojo takes care of his young sister Kayla and lives with his black grandparents, Mam and Pop, all the while trying to grow up and figure out who he is. Seeing the world through Jojo's eyes is raw and painful, but also beautiful because they capture Mam and Pop's love for him and Kayla.
I do feel like there was a missed opportunity with Leonie, Jojo's mother. We get passages from her perspective, but they are just one-dimensional, showing her as essentially the bad guy who neglects her kids for drugs or hits them when she is occasionally present. But we don't get her motivations. Often it's portrayed as she does bad things just because. For a book that so lovingly created Jojo's character, I wish the supporting cast is more three-dimensional.
The other story is about ghosts. There's a few of them hanging around, and whenever it's their perspective in the book, it's hard to read. The words are beautiful, but once you string them into sentences, they don't always make sense and they slow down the book. To me, if they were taken out of the tale altogether and we got more of the other story, this book would have been better for it.
Readaroo Rating: 3 stars
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