Not Json, it's a string with object literals

[JasonDWilson]

JSON looks like this
{
"name":"json"
}

object literal looks like this
{
name: "object literal"
}

what athena-express returns is
'{
name: "string of object literal"
}'

Is there something I can do to get it return json? I'm currently parsing it and stringifying the results to get well formed json, but there are edge cases where it errors.