WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised ...

There was basically no consensus in NUBClub for this subread. Opinions ranged from deep love to absolute dismissal. All of agreed that the beginning of the book was hard to read. Watching Leonie's incompetence -- her rampant drug use, her bad attachment to her imprisoned husband, her inability to function as a daughter or a month -- just made her a very hard character to sympathize with or even follow. All of us felt the book picked up with JoJo narrated, and that there were good scenes in JoJo's relationship with the grandparents and with his younger sister. It's simply hard to watch Leonie make critical parenting mistakes (including almost poisoning her child and getting arrested) and stick with the novel. But the second half of the book is where opinions deeply split. As the supernatural elements of Richie and Lionie's brother Given, two men murdered by racist violence, come into the narrative, those sympathetic to the book found it hit its stride. The story of how JoJo's grandfather and Ritchie were tied together in a tragic act of desperation and love, the moment of redemption for Leonie in assisting her mother's passing, and the final revelation that telling the stories of the ghosts does not give them freedom were all powerful and moving statements about the legacy of racism and systematic oppression on the families. However, those that didn't like the book found all of this content cliched and overwritten. Ward's writing hits and misses, and when she misses, it's often into obvious and overwrought ways, and in this book (significantly more than Salvage the Bones) that just turned some people off. Showing the ghosts of the victims of lynchings hanging out in trees watching was just a bit too pat for the naysayers, and nothing the book presented up to the point redeemed it. There's no single thing to take away from this review. A lot of your opinion of this book is just going to rest on how much you can find sympathy for these characters and how much of Ward's sometimes ponderous and perhaps melodramatic symbolism you are willing to take along the ride.