Turner House

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 gravitated to because of its setting - Detroit.

Charles "Cha-Cha" Turner is the oldest of 13 children, all of them born and raised in Detroit to parents newly up from Arkansas. (Cha-Cha, in fact, spent his earliest years in a shotgun house there, but the other 12 siblings were all Detroit-born. But I digress.) As the oldest, Cha-Cha is long accustomed to looking after his younger siblings and, since the death of his father, to being their patriarch. His trouble is his haint. The haint, a ghost-like spirit, first visited him as an adolescent living on Detroit's east side. It's left him along for decades, but has returned now, and is driving Cha-Cha mad. The timing couldn't be worse, as he and his wife have become full-time caretakers to his live-in, elderly mother, his youngest sister is going through her own crisis, and the family must decide whether to short-sell their beloved, but now unoccupied, family home.

In Turner House, Flournoy has given the reader much to love. She has created a bevy of characters - thirteen siblings, their parents, their children, and so on - but has wisely focused most of her attention on a manageable handful of them, so that the reader is neither overwhelmed, nor wondering, where a character came from or when and why they were dropped from the story. Not only do her characters truly resonate, but so do the troubles they face. Cha-Cha's haint is unique to him, but can also be symbolic of so many mid-life crises. Flournoy's writing is often amusing without being laugh-out-loud funny, and she sustains the same tone throughout the book.

Ultimately, it's easy to see why Turner House was a 2016 National Book Award finalist.

Four stars.