The Turner House

Adenrele Ojo's narration doesn't help the listener navigate this sprawling tale of the Turner family, with its 13 children. Focused on Cha-Cha, the eldest, and Lelah, the youngest, the audiobook wends its way through time frames: 1958, when Cha first sees the haint; the present day, when the blighted neighborhood casts a shadow on the family home; and the 1940s, when Francis was part of the Great Migration that established the family in this once prosperous neighborhood. Incongruous pauses in Ojo's narration and a huge cast of characters lacking distinctive voices challenge the listener's enjoyment and comprehension. The dialogue, which is in dialect, would have been enhanced by the use of pacing, tone, and inflection to distinguish the speakers. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Starred review from January 5, 2015
Flounoy’s debut is a lively, thoroughly engaging family saga with a cast of fully realized characters. Francis and Viola Turner and their 13 children have lived in a house on Detroit’s East Side for more than 50 years. In its prime, Yarrow Street was a comfortable haven for black working-class homeowners. In 2008, after Detroit’s long economic depression, Francis has died and Viola is about to lose the house, the value of which has declined to less than the owed mortgage payments, and the siblings are faced with a difficult decision about the house’s fate. Flournoy focuses on three of the Turner siblings—Cha-Cha, the eldest son, who drove an 18-wheeler carrying Chryslers before an accident took him off the road; Troy, the youngest son, a policeman with an ambitious, illegal plan; and Lelah, the unstable youngest daughter, who has a gambling addiction. In addition to the pressing financial issue regarding their family home, the plot touches on the moral, emotional, marital, and psychological problems that affect the siblings. Flournoy evokes the intricacies of domestic situations and sibling relationships, depicting how each of the Turners’ lives has been shaped by the social history of their generation. She handles time and place with a veteran’s ease as the narrative swings between decades, at times leaping back to the 1940s. A family secret, which involves a “haint” (or ghost) who became Francis’s nemesis—perhaps real, perhaps just a superstition—appears many years later to haunt Cha-Cha. Readers may be reminded of Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, but Flournoy puts her own distinctive stamp on this absorbing narrative.