Perturbed spirits

The events of this book take place where the world of the living and the world of the dead rub shoulders. Mama, 12-year-old Jojo’s grandmother, hears the voices — singing, talking, crying — of ghosts; Leoni, Jojo’s mother, sees her brother — ‘given, that he’s been dead 15 years now’ — sitting at the table, in the car, on the sofa between her and her friend, and every time she is high; and Richie, a 12-year-old boy whom Jojo’s grandfather, Pops, knew in prison, haunts Jojo, searching for a way ‘home’.

Sometimes despondent and aimless, at other times desperate and angry, the ghosts of almost exclusively black people are present everywhere — contorted into small spaces, crouched outside windows, ‘laying, curled into the roots of a great live oak, looking half dead and half asleep, and all ghost’ — each one ‘stuck’, due to the violence of his or her death.