Surprised by how much I'm liking Sing, Unburied, Sing

I've put off reading the fiction of Jesmyn Ward because I rarely care for fiction that includes lush prose, lavish descriptions, touches of the supernatural, voices from the dead, but at last began reading her recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing (you can see how the title itself touches on the elements of fiction that I don't care to read) and, guess what?, I'm a believer - she has completely captivated me (through the first two of ten chapters) with the beauty of her prose, the level of detail in her descriptions, her ear for dialog, her subtle wit, and her capacity for telling a complex narrative that weaves back and forth through time and involves many complex relationships centered on one family (each chapter focused on a single family member but through his or her perceptions touching on all the others). Her antecedents are obvious, of the highest order, often imitated, rarely successfully - Faulkner of course comes to mind, also Garcia Marquez. It's too soon to say whether Ward measures up to that high standard and if so whether she can maintain that over a career, but she's off to a great start. The plot so far involves a family in the Mississippi delta shortly after the hurricane (there was a recent movie w/ a similar setting - have to look up the name), the young son, JoJo, more or less abandoned to his grandparents - or actually his grandfather, as grandmother is dying of cancer - as his father, a white man, is in prison and mother, black, working in a back-country bar and heavily into coke and other rx,. JW writes w/ a lot of tenderness and sympathy for the family member and their struggle against poverty and the racism of the deep South, but she pulls no punches, either - the characters have flaws and failures of their own. The crisis of the plot seems to involve the pending release of the father, Michael, from prison and the wounds that will open - the white family and black family are mortal enemies, stemming back to an incident in which one of Michael's relatives (a brother?) shot to death Jojo's uncle, a rising star athlete who provoked jealousy and animosity among his white teammates and so-called friends. This is a complex web of a plot, a la Faulkner, and requires more than the usual attention during reading, and JW smoothly slips about among the various characters and time frames - but I suspect that in the end she will develop a complete and complex family and community portrait. She hasn't yet quite staked out the delta community has her Yoknapatawpha or Mocondo - that will take further unraveling of the long social history of these and other characters - but that may come, later in this novel or perhaps in the future.