Joel H. Morris is the author of All Our Yesterdays, his debut novel. He has worked most recently as an English teacher and, for the past twenty years, has taught language and literature. Prior to earning a doctorate in comparative literature, he spent several years as a bookseller before joining a small maritime expedition company as a sailor.
At Electric Lit Morris tagged "seven novels involving literal and metaphorical ghost children." One title on the list:
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn WardRead about the other entries on the list.
The child ghost in Ward’s haunting generational novel is Richie, sent to Parchman prison farm for stealing for his family when he wastwelve. While 13-year-old Jojo and his mother, Leonie, drive the narrative, it is Richie who haunts the family through its patriarch, Pop. As a youth, Pop was responsible for killing Richie—a mercy to spare the boy a brutal beating and death. Richie has haunted Parchman for decades, an embodiment of injustice and racist cruelty. When he hitches a ride with Jojo and Leonie to find Pop again, Jojo can see him, speak to him. He becomes a haunting figure of generational trauma, the past made present. In his transition to the afterlife, “home,” he joins a multitude of tormented souls, singers of the history of brutality.
Sing, Unburied, Sing is among Sarah Bernstein's top ten grudge holders in fiction, James Yorkston's top ten road novels, Stacey Swann's seven novels about very dysfunctional families, Una Mannion’s top ten books about children fending for themselves, Sahar Mustafah's seven novels about grieving a family member and LitHub's ten books we'll be reading in ten years.
--Marshal Zeringue
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