The Turner House

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Turner house is falling apart. In an old neighborhood in Detroit, it once housed the 13 Turner children as they grew up. Now the Turner children are grown with adult children of their own, Mama is sick and living with Cha Cha, the eldest, and they must decide what to do with a house not worth what they owe on it. That is just the backdrop for the beautiful, brawling story of this interconnected clan. Flournoy only highlights a few of the kids here, touches on others, and only mentions some in passing, but you get the sense of how this big family works, with each sibling accepting or bucking their role in the family. Flournoy highlights the ghosts we carry we with us, literally and figuratively, as we fight for our own identities...even when we are well beyond 60. I enjoyed this book, even though I realized some time later there was very little resolutions in the end. But life is like that, no wrapped up ending, just small joys and victories, and if we are lucky a family that despite all the bickering can still get together and dance.


View all my reviews

"self-sabotaging self-righteousness masked as self-reliance."

"Slavery.  Did there ever exist a more annoying way to try to make a modern-day black man feel like his troubles were insignificant, that he should be satisfied with the sorry hand society dealt him?"

"the line of reasoning was faulty; it was precisely because his grandfather's father was born a slave that he should expect more from life, and more from this country, to make up for lost time at the very least."

"Lelah saw it had cost too much to aim for so little>"