There is a trace of Gabriel García Márquez in this novel — and not just in the way the fantastic is matter-of-factly described in one of the subplots, which involves a persistent, malevolent ghost, called a haint. The Turner House also contains a Márquezian abundance of characters, and it puts forth the notion that each generation exerts an influence on the ones to follow, even when that influence isn’t consciously felt ... That Flournoy’s main characters are black is central to this book, and yet her treatment of that essential fact is never essentializing. Flournoy gets at the universal through the patient observation of one family’s particulars. In this assured and memorable novel, she provides the feeling of knowing a family from the inside out, as we would wish to know our own.
What is most exciting about Angela Flournoy’s debut novel, The Turner House, is that while history is everywhere in it—haunting its characters, embedded in the walls of the titular house and in the crumbling streets of Detroit-the book tingles with immediacy. Flournoy has written an epic that feels deeply personal ... In the end, it is Flournoy's finely tuned empathy that infuses her characters with a radiant humanity.
The Turner House is an elegant and assured debut that takes a refreshing approach to discussing mental health issues within a black family that’s resistant to direct conversation about them. In the end, it doesn’t matter if the haint that drew us into the narrative is 'real' to anyone but Cha-Cha. His belief in it is enough for readers to invest in his exorcism of it and of all the other hounds of history that haunt him.
Flournoy paints a vivid picture of the embattled city across three African American generations ... It all comes to an explosive head one night when the siblings confront each other in the home they grew up in. Composed with deep sympathy — especially for the character of Lelah — The Turner House is an apt and engrossing response to Cha Cha’s tormented query: 'Why not give in to every impulse, break free and go insane...in a world where people made structures disappear overnight?'”
As the plot threads get tied up in unpredictable ways, The Turner House speeds along like a page-turner. Flournoy’s richly wrought prose and intimate, vivid dialogue make this novel feel like settling deeply into the family armchair.
Flournoy’s spare, headstrong style enables her to lay bare, without pretensions, a story about the black American diaspora in which slavery, segregation, and gentrification are all joined in a single narrative. The Turner family isn’t a vessel for a history lesson, but history is ambient for them, right up to the present moment ... Flournoy’s language is a fit instrument for channeling the Turners’ special plight, which one of the siblings, Troy, describes as self-sabotaging self-righteousness masked as self-reliance.'
Michigan comes through every precisely rendered detail, from the Faygo soda and Better Made chips to the neighborhoods where enterprising thieves will lift entire garages off their foundations for the scrap metal ... With The Turner House, Flournoy has written an utterly unsentimental love story that, rather like the house on Yarrow Street, manages to make room for everyone.
