NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A powerful, timely debut, The Turner House marks a major new contribution to the story of the American family.
The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone—and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit’s East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still … of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts—and shapes—their family’s future.
Praised by Ayana Mathis as “utterly moving” and “un-putdownable,” The Turner House brings us a colorful, complicated brood full of love and pride, sacrifice and unlikely inheritances. It’s a striking examination of the price we pay for our dreams and futures, and the ways in which our families bring us home.
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I just started The Turner House and I’m really liking it. It follows a family in Detroit as they try to solve the problem of their debt-laden and abandoned family home on the city’s east side. I love books about my hometown obvi and I’m really digging Flournoy’s writing.
(The cover with the little Maple tree helicopters is way better than this …
The Turner House is a multi-generational tale of affection and disaffection within a family that lives in Detroit, but has roots in the rural South. It is a deft combination of social realism and magical realism. The description of Detroit, in its heyday and in its decline, is both accurate and loving, and the environment is one that is haunted in …
I read The Turner House with smiles at my own memories of our family gatherings. Every event is a family reunion. Our family is so large that there are members of my family that I have never even met. The stories that Flournoy crafted to display the relationship between 13 siblings, all gathered around Mama, who is dying, and wistful recall of a …
It took me a little bit to get into this book, as it was hard to follow the different characters, since there are so many of them. But after reading a couple chapters, and getting used to the flashbacks, the characters started to grow on me, and I found myself wanting to read more, and learn more of their stories. While there are more than 15 …
One of my goals this year is to read more broadly, from a wider cross-section of authors, settings, and time periods. Regular readers of this blog will know that, in faction, I skew heavily toward the historical, and when I deviate into the present day, the result is usually disappointment. Not so with Angela Flournoy’s Turner House, which I …
Loved this book, not only because this family would have been my back-door neighbors in Detroit, but also because of the wide range of characters and the very realistic and moving depiction of a modern black family in Detroit.
Decent read with a few developed characters, flaws and all.