The Turner House

Flournoy’s beautifully written debut novel portrays family relationships with insight and fairness and while specific to the African-American Turner family in a specific time and place yet is universal in its appeal and subject matter. The house in the title has been in the Turner family for 50 years and was home to parents Francis and Viola and their 13 children and some of their grandchildren. The home sits in Detroit’s East Side in a community that has seen better days, whose mortgage is much more than the value of the home, and is currently unoccupied – so what to do with the house is the question put forth to the children, grandchildren, and matriarch Viola.

While the storylines concentrates the most on Francis (father), show more Charles (Cha-Cha – the eldest) and Lelah (the youngest), other siblings and Viola make appearances and have their say. Through the parents we see the trials and tribulations of moving to the North for a “better” life, and through Charles and Lelah we see the changing times of Detroit. Intense family scenes are balanced with moments of quiet reflection so the reader often feels like a quiet observer.

This is a social novel with good and bad times fueled by sibling rivalry, familial resentment and marital strife. I enjoyed how Flournoy retained empathy for her characters as she shred the pretensions and hypocrisies of the times her African-American characters live in. While it is often not difficult to figure out a lot of the actions, it is a measure of the author’s skills that this seems perfect and does not distract from my reading pleasure. Chockful of characters whose stories are waiting to be told, I wondered if there was going to be a sequel and/or if I would see the characters in another book.
Fans of family sagas will savor this lyrically perceptive tale. And book clubs would be wise to select The Turner House as one of their discussion books. show less

A lot of people reviewing this book talk about how it didn’t dwell on the difficulties of either being black and moving north in the 1940s or the dissipation and destruction of black neighborhoods in Detroit and what it was like to live through it. Personally, I’m glad it didn’t. I think many writers of color get pigeonholed into writing only about how difficult it is to be brown. There is merit there and if that’s the story a person wants to tell, great, tell it. But what if it isn’t? If it’s just the story of a family and the dynamics between individuals regardless of race or circumstance, that’s the story that should be told. I think there are enough stories that show how divided we are; how we fight, and not enough show more about how similar we are; how much we share. That families are families no matter what and that no one ends up the same just because they share parents.

That’s pretty much what we get here. There are a lot of characters, but not all of them are one of the 13 Turner siblings. For the most part, the light that shines on the family comes from the oldest, Cha-Cha (Charles), and the youngest, Lelah. Of course they do interact with their siblings because their mother is ageing and the family house is slowly being destroyed by time, neglect and vandalism. Plus she’s dying and things have to be decided.

As the oldest, Cha-Cha has always felt he was another parent to the younger ones. Providing guidance, example and money on occasion. He feels he doesn’t really have relationships with his brothers and sisters, only expectations. This continues with his wife, Tina. This is a particularly sharp insight that I loved - “She held out a glass of water and his blood pressure pills, pills he’d neglected to take all week. The oversight startled him. More evidence of just how much his day-to-day well-being was dependent on Tina’s vigilance. He had set it up this way, encouraged her to stop working. He facilitated this metamorphosis into pushy caretaker, clingy nursemaid. It had made him feel like a man, an old-fashioned, all-capable man like his father. Now he felt like a child. Trapped in the cage of condescension and coddling that he’d built himself.”

Now he has to find a way to get out from under his role of father and child. The baby of the family, Lelah, has her own set of issues - she’s a gambling addict and has just been evicted from her apartment and fired from her job. Because no one is living in the Turner House and she has a key, she moves in on the sly. She doesn’t want to be rescued and knows she can straighten out her own mess, but it’s hard to be an addict and keep disappointing her family. Her situation, although more dire than Cha-Cha’s, didn’t wrap up one way or another. She’s in limbo, but limbo with her family.

And that’s how it ends overall - things are suspended, like they are all through life, but I hoped for a bit more resolution. Too many hanging threads. As a novel it didn’t do anything new or amazing. It didn’t grind the race difficulties to death; they were there as you might expect, but they weren’t the point or the focus. It had characters I liked to read about and spend time with; something rare in a family saga/drama novel, so maybe that was new. This wasn’t The Corrections! All in all and enjoyable story about a family that might be larger than yours, but isn’t really that different. show less

The Turner House is a strong literary debut about family, relationships and aging in Detroit across World War II and the GFC. It’s powerful, entertaining and memorable.

The Turners have lived in Detroit since their parents moved during World War II and after. Thirteen children lived in the same house during their youth and now that their father is dead and mother frail, something needs to be done about the house. But selling during 2008 in Detroit isn’t going to work when the mortgage is more than the house is worth. It’s up to the siblings what to do with their home, and as you’d expect, there are multiple differing opinions. But there is more than just that going on. Oldest son Cha-Cha is reminded of his childhood experience show more with a ghost (despite ‘there ain’t no haints in Detroit’ according to his dad) which comes back to haunt him in a truck accident. He’s trying to work out what he wants and the role he plays in his family. Youngest sibling Lelah has her own problems after being evicted and living secretly in the old family home. Can she stay away from the roulette tables long enough to win her daughter’s respect again? The other siblings also make appearances from policeman Troy to health-obsessed Francy (and there’s even a family tree if you forget who sits where). It’s a big, ultimately loving family but they all have things they want heard and need to sift through. The story also shifts to Francis’ initial trip to Detroit to find work as a Black man from the south and his problems in supporting his wife as life in the city isn’t what it seems.

This is a brilliant story and I’m kind of disappointed that there isn’t a second novel of Flournoy’s to devour. But clever, memorable stories take time. This is a fantastic, detailed story of a family that never loses its focus. It’s funny, sad and astonishing, sometimes all at once. Flournoy has created memorable characters, from the major (Cha-Cha and his wife Tina and Lelah) to the minor (middle kids Duke and Miles). Detroit is also a major character, from its boom times to the burnt-out destitute shell. Flournoy tells the story of Detroit using the Turners to demonstrate the good and bad times. Even the ghost that appears tends to represent the city’s downfall.

I do wish this book had gone on longer, as I wanted to know more about each of the Turner siblings and what had shaped their lives. It’s written at a good pace, never spending too long on one character, and the language used puts the reader in the front row of all the drama but not quite in the thick of it. While Francis Turner may not have thought there were ghosts in Detroit, the novel suggests that your past is not all that far from your present.

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Home is a powerful symbol. At its best, home stands for haven, that safe place where someone loves you regardless of what has happened, because you belong there.

That’s the kind of home The Turner House has been for the family of 13 brothers and sisters, raised in a Yarrow Street home in Detroit in Angela Flournoy’s debut novel. For more than 50 years, through the rise and fall of working class Detroit, the Turners have known love in that house and gone on to raise their own families.

Their truck-driving father Francis has died and now their matriarch, Viola, has had to move in with the oldest son and his wife after suffering strokes. The Turner house is now one of those abandoned houses on Detroit’s east side. The debt on it is far show more more than what anyone will pay for it after the era of predatory loans hit the Turners, like many of their neighbors.

Being it’s a large family, not all the siblings are in the same situation or the same mindset. Some think of ways they could scrounge up enough money to pay what the bank wants to short-sell the house for. Others scheme to see if someone they know will pay the bank so they can have the house.

The youngest, Lelah, has just been evicted from her apartment. She has a serious gambling addiction and was fired after borrowing from fellow employees and complaining when she was sexually harassed. Babysitting her grandson is a way to stay out of the casino and a place to be daytime, but it’s not 24 hours and she’s not on the best of terms with her daughter. She has no other place to go except home, sneaking into the old home at night.

Being able to go home meant a lot to her when her marriage fell apart and she took her baby to her parents’ house:

"Even before moving home for good, she’d seen that staying in the Midwest had its rewards, the most significant being that Brianne received Francis Turner’s blessing. A blessing from Francis did not have a spiritual connotation in any formal sense. It meant that Francis would get to know your child in a way that wasn’t possible for everyone in his ever-expanding line. In the final years of his life, Francis spent most days on the back porch, eyeing his tomato patch with good-natured suspicion, listening to his teams lose on the radio, and smoking his pipe. He did these things, and he held Brianne. Right against his chest. Francis had nothing cute or remotely entertaining to offer babies, he didn’t say anything to them at all. Instead he gave them his heartbeat. Put their little heads on his chest and went about his day. Even the fussiest babies seemed to know better than to cut short their time with Francis via undue crying or excessive pooping. Lelah would stand in the back doorway and watch Brianne sleeping against Francis, his large hand holding her up by the butt, and think she could stand a few more years of being close by. How many babies had he held just like that since Cha-Cha was born, using only his heartbeat as conversation?"

There is a moment at the end of the book that underlays Lelah’s memory. It’s one of those heart-warming moments that isn’t forced, but which means more because it’s true.

The oldest, Cha-Cha, has always felt responsible and really knows how to fuss with finesse. Saving the family home is so important to him. So is taking care of his mother. And depending on his wife to make the huge family gatherings go off without a hitch. A truck driver delivering loads of new cars, Cha-Cha ran his truck off the road one night. It wasn’t fatigue. He saw the haint that he hadn’t seen since he was a child. And now he’s got to go to a company psychiatrist to talk about it.

As the oldest and youngest deal with their problems, they reach out to family and family won’t leave them alone. This is one of the strengths of Flournoy’s novel. Although the largest family I know has only six siblings, the dynamics are the same as depicted here. The love and logistics are palpable. Flournoy handles a huge cast -- and yes, jumps back and forth in time -- and never once is the reader confused about who, what or when.

Siblings appear to be on the verge of making the worst mistakes they could. None of them, however, go through what Francis did when he came up to Detroit after his military service looking for work, leaving Viola and his oldest back home in the South. Some of what happens to Francis is due to the times, but he is the true patriarch of the family when he exhibits pride that controls how he makes his decisions. It’s something that many of his children struggle with as well. But Flournoy shows not only that pride masquerading as self-righteousness can get a person in trouble, pride also can be a source of strength to make it through hard times and persevere.

Just as Flournoy is able to work with so many characters, she also is able to convey what matters about so many elements -- post-war Detroit job hunting, today’s unemployment lines, casinos, pawnshops, haints, family, siblings, children, past debts, making payments that aren’t just money, making retribution, making do, doing better, dreams, schemes, addition, healing, honesty in confrontations about old and new hurts, forgiveness and fresh starts.

Everything revolves around each other and their house:

"Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone."

Thanks to Angela Flournoy, the fictional Turners have a legacy of a home that is far more than a house. It is also a haven for a reader. No wonder this novel is a National Book Award finalist. show less

“Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone.” – Angela Flournoy, The Turner show more House

This book tells the story of the Turner family and their house in Detroit where thirteen siblings grew up. It focuses on the backstories of matriarch Viola, her husband, Francis, eldest son, Charles, nicknamed Cha-Cha, youngest daughter Lelah, and youngest son Troy. The modern story, set in 2008, is interwoven with scenes from the past seventy years. Viola now lives with Cha-Cha in the suburbs. Cha-Cha is haunted by ghost, called a “haint,” which he first encounters as a child and has stayed with him into his sixties. He is seeing a therapist about it. Lelah’s gambling addiction leads to her eviction and subsequent encampment in the now-vacant childhood home. Troy, a policeman, wants to short-sell the family’s house to his girlfriend.

The author covers a lot of ground. She shows the reader the history of Detroit across the generations, including themes of racial inequality, job loss, deterioration of the inner city, increasing prevalence of addition, and the correlated rise in crimes. I am impressed at her ability to portray this history through a focus on a singular large family. The characters are well-developed and realistic. The pressures on the family members are apparent and worsened by their ongoing emphasis on pride and not directly confronting issues. For example, Lelah’s gambling addiction becomes a major stumbling block, but her pride keeps her from sharing her troubles with her daughter. And Cha-Cha hides the nature of their mother’s illness from his siblings, believing he is protecting them.

One of my favorite scenes is the family gathering, which shows all the siblings and their many children coming together for a celebration of the matriarch’s birthday – this chapter is a wonderful piece of writing and vividly imaginable. The primary downside, for me, is the “haint,” which is a major portion of the storyline. I am not a big fan of stories involving ghosts, though perhaps it is supposed to be symbolic. I also think the ending is rather lackluster compared to the rest. Taken as a whole, though, this is a promising debut and I look forward to reading more from Angela Flournoy. show less

A tale of a large black family from Detroit--13 brothers and sisters--set mostly in 2008, and revealed primarily through the eyes of the oldest brother, Cha-Cha (age 60), and the troubled youngest sister, Lelah (age 40). In the background, the mother is dying; there are short flashbacks to the father's youth; and a ghost (haint) hovers over Cha-Cha. The scale of this story is small. I learned a lot about the outward characteristics of the family, but I never got to the essence of even one character. The novel ends with a big family party, which is appropriate, because I felt I had spent a family holiday with these people, watching them, talking with them, eating, hearing some family tales, but not really knowing any of them at their show more core. Although there's plenty of food at this party, I'm still hungry. For a National Book Award finalist, disappointing. show less

Serendipitously enough, I read this book at the same time as Beloved. It's no spoiler that both books feature haunted houses, to an extent. But while in Beloved, we find out the mystery of the ghost up front and then spend the book getting to know her, in The Turner House, the question of the haint's identity, cause, provenance, and even existence is what drives the book. Even though the cast of characters is extensive in this book (13 siblings, plus two parents, one therapist, and at least five significant others, all spanning a time jump), it didn't feel crowded. The narrative threads that followed the main characters were cohesive and interestingly intertwined, and the profiles of the side characters that didn't get much more than a show more look felt like vignettes. If anything, it took me a while to get into the book. The second half felt somewhat like a first half in that I would have been ready to read half as much again by the time I got through the whole thing.

The main reason why I didn't give this book another star is that I felt throughout that the most interesting part of Cha-Cha's wrestling with the haint is the question of whether it's a "real" spirit or whether it's a hallucination and a symptom of clinical mental illness (I don't know if that sentence accurately captures the difference that is up for debate in the book). I think this back-and-forth is a really compelling issue between folk and modern medicine. My issue was that the resolution of the book, with Cha-Cha realizing that the haint was his father and represented the hurt he had done to him as a young boy, kind of felt like Alice was just right the whole time. I love the symbolism (both in this and Beloved) of a ghost as being representative of generational trauma. But I thought this book lost a lot of its potential magical realism in its conclusion. Maybe I'm wrong, though, and maybe this kind of combination of mystical and medical in the nature of the haint was just the right kind of combination to capture a family that's suspended between past, present and future. Ack, idk. show less