The Englewood Review of Books
Best Books of 2017
Advent Calendar
December 8
The Englewood Review of Books
*** Best Novel of 2017! ***
[easyazon_image align=”left” height=”250″ identifier=”1501126067″ locale=”US” src=”https://englewoodreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/515pYTNTrcL.jpg” tag=”douloschristo-20″ width=”163″]Sing, Unburied, Sing:
A Novel
Jesmyn Ward
Hardback: Scribner, 2017.
Buy Now:
[ [easyazon_link identifier=”1501126067″ locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Amazon[/easyazon_link] ] [ [easyazon_link identifier=”B01M9I7CRC” locale=”US” tag=”douloschristo-20″]Kindle[/easyazon_link] ]
“I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I can look at straight.” From this first line of Jesmyn Ward’s new novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, the reader is given fair warning: this is a book that invites you to look at death head-on. I was tempted to turn away from all the ways death crept into Ward’s lyrical pages, but I told myself I need to read this book and our nation needs to read this book. Be it slow and incomplete, through erasure or meth, or spreading like cancer and oil spill, or as swift as a bullet, rope, or knife, death’s cruel sting fills these pages. But this book is not full of gratuitous violence. Ward, like Flannery O’Connor or Toni Morrison, uses the horror of death to show us something about mercy
and grace. Just as the cross is the path to resurrection, there is redemptive work being done in this powerful and painful novel. Though it may cause the reader to cry hot and bitter tears, it can be a part of the healing.
- Josina Guess,
from our review of this novel
in our Advent 2017 magazine issue
( SUSBSCRIBE NOW to the magazine)
*** READ a review of this novel
from The New Yorker
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