Flournoy’s strength lies in her meticulous examination of each character’s inner life. Flournoy ramps up the suspense until, one night, the three are all drawn to Yarrow Street, leading to a fight with intractable results. Pastel, melt-away things that didn’t make sense to save”-worsens Cha-Cha is visited by the ghost, dredging up ugly childhood memories and Troy tries to con Viola into selling the house. Lelah’s roulette addiction, evocatively described-“the chips looked like candy. As the story progresses, the siblings’ dilemmas become increasingly knotty. And Troy, a disillusioned policeman, wants to illegally short sell the house to his sometime girlfriend. Meanwhile, Lelah has been evicted from her apartment due to a gambling addiction and takes up residence in the now-abandoned house.

Cha-Cha, the oldest at 64, drives trucks for Chrysler and is recovering from an accident after a vision of a luminous ghost, which he’d last seen 40 years earlier at Yarrow, caused him to veer off the road. But the house has built up debt, their ill mother, Viola, lives elsewhere, and a question hangs-what to do with the Yarrow Street house? As the children debate, the narrative divides into the perspectives of Lelah, Troy and Charlie “Cha Cha” Turner, interspersed with their father’s flashbacks of surviving in gritty Detroit 60 years earlier. It’s also the crux of memories of their dead father and a link among 13 very different adults. A complicated portrait of the modern American family emerges in Flournoy's debut novel.įor the 13 Turner siblings, the house on Detroit’s East Side isn’t just their childhood home.

The turner house by angela flournoy