Turner House (Flournoy) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[A]n engrossing and remarkably mature first novel…Flournoy's prose is artful without being showy. She takes the time to flesh out the world…In her accretion of resonant details, Flournoy recounts the history of Detroit with more sensitivity than any textbook could…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.
Matthew Thomas - New York Times Book Review


An elegant and assured debut.
Washington Post


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.
Christian Science Monitor


One of the many strengths of this book—entertaining, well-written and keenly insightful without calling attention to itself—is its clear-eyed, unsentimental vision. Flournoy never ignores the problems afflicting family and place—a 13-child clan and Detroit—even as she pays homage to both.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


The Turner House [is] not only a first novel but a lamentation for and a paean to Detroit, from the mid-1940s to the present day, a funny yet heart-wrenching book, both beautiful and revealing of all the ways close human beings relate to one another (and to places and things) over time.
Buffalo News


Nobody can take you from joyful to infuriated as fast as your brother or sister. Similarly, the ups and downs of the 13 siblings that populate The Turner House, the first novel by Angela Flournoy, whip from laugh-out-loud to heart-crushing. Still, she proves even bonds that have stretched a mile long have the ability to snap back.
Essence Magazine


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.
Entertainment Weekly


Flournoy has written an epic that feels deeply personal...Flournoy’s finely tuned empathy infuses her characters with a radiant humanity.
Oprah Magazine


Epic, ambitious and strikingly executed, The Turner House is an impressive debut novel. In the grand tradition of family dramas by the late Bebe Moore Campbell, it is lively and entertaining, with subtle humor and engaging voice. Flournoy manages the difficult feat of skillfully telling the stories of 13 children, their parents and accompanying spouses and love interests in an irresistible style. Here we have a deeply satisfying portrayal of relationships among those to whom we, for better or worse, are related by blood.
The Root


[A] dynamite Detroit debut.... The Turner House belongs on the shelf with the very finest books about one of America’s most dynamic, tortured, and resilient cities.... There are cracklingly alive scenes inside pawn shops and factories, casinos and living rooms. Flournoy has a deft touch with the verbal and psychological sparring between spouses, siblings, and parents and children.... One of Flournoy’s great achievements is that she doesn’t draw attention to the fact that virtually every one of her characters is black. This is just part of the novel’s oxygen and furniture, a Detroit given. Therein lies its quiet strength...Angela Flournoy is an exciting new talent whose debut has enriched Detroit’s flowering literature. Read The Turner House, and I’m sure you’ll join me in waiting, eagerly, to see what its gifted author comes up with next.
Millions


What is rarer, and much more difficult, in a story is to involve numerous family members as point-of-view characters. Faulkner set the standard with As I Lay Dying, and contemporary incarnations like A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg have run the spectrum. This is exactly the challenge that Angela Flournoy takes on in her debut novel The Turner House, with admirable success.... The Turner House is a wonderfully crafted glimpse into the intimacy of family, and shows immense promise for Flournoy.
Bustle


(Starred review.) Flournoy’s debut is a lively, thoroughly engaging family saga with a cast of fully realized characters.... [She] 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....absorbing.
Publishers Weekly


Debut novelist Flournoy limns the fate of African Americans who have seen their hard-won success in reaching the middle class in a single generation blown to bits by our continuing economic malaise.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Encompassing a multitude of themes, including aging and parenthood, this is a compelling read that is funny and moving in equal measure.
Booklist


What makes The Turner House profound is its reality, its observation of a family so diverse and well-drawn that they seem real.... We rarely find such an honest portrait of what it means to be a sibling—defined by your differences as much as your similarities—as the one Flournoy gives us.
BookPage


A complicated portrait of the modern American family emerges in Flournoy's debut novel.... Flournoy's writing is precise and sharp, and despite several loose ends...the novel draws readers to the Turner family almost magnetically. A talent to watch.
Kirkus Reviews