Last night in a bout of insomnia (I finally fell asleep around 4:30am), I ended up finishing The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. I had first heard about this book years ago, and had actually pre-ordered it for when it came out on paperback (I really dislike hardbacks, because they're far too big to hold comfortably in my small hands). I had heard it was about a black family in Detroit, and it had won a bunch of awards. Sounded good enough, but also like one of those novels that aren't brain dead, and so I put it off for when I felt mentally engaged enough to deal with the subject matter, which apparently happened to be this week.
Overall the book wasn't as wrenching as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and the Book of Unknown Americans (God, these long novel titles!), and so was a relatively easy read. Last Summer in my American History class, I chose to review Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis - Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, and so had some degree of familiarity with the problems that plague Detroit, and I found myself continuously thinking of Sugrue's book as I read The Turner House. But beyond history (The Great Migration, Detroit in its industrial heyday, mentions of the 1967 riots, the state of Detroit in 2015, etc.), the book also talked about family dynamics of a big family - the Turner family has 13 children (the closest analogue I could think of was my Mum's family of 7 children, and the associated family dynamics that come with an extended working class family) and gambling addiction.
At the core of most of the stories is, of course, the Turner family home in a now rundown and slightly dangerous part of present day Detroit; at the end of the book the oldest son, Cha-Cha drives to the family house and realises that scrappers have stolen the whole garage to sell for scrap metal - this part made me laugh because of believable and how ludicrous it was simultaneously. As a bonus I particularly enjoyed reading the Acknowledgements section when I finished the book, and saw that Flournoy credited Sugrue's book for helping her 'establish' Detroit. Academia props!
I liked this book enough, but not as much as the previous two books. I give it 7.5/10.
Overall the book wasn't as wrenching as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and the Book of Unknown Americans (God, these long novel titles!), and so was a relatively easy read. Last Summer in my American History class, I chose to review Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis - Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, and so had some degree of familiarity with the problems that plague Detroit, and I found myself continuously thinking of Sugrue's book as I read The Turner House. But beyond history (The Great Migration, Detroit in its industrial heyday, mentions of the 1967 riots, the state of Detroit in 2015, etc.), the book also talked about family dynamics of a big family - the Turner family has 13 children (the closest analogue I could think of was my Mum's family of 7 children, and the associated family dynamics that come with an extended working class family) and gambling addiction.
At the core of most of the stories is, of course, the Turner family home in a now rundown and slightly dangerous part of present day Detroit; at the end of the book the oldest son, Cha-Cha drives to the family house and realises that scrappers have stolen the whole garage to sell for scrap metal - this part made me laugh because of believable and how ludicrous it was simultaneously. As a bonus I particularly enjoyed reading the Acknowledgements section when I finished the book, and saw that Flournoy credited Sugrue's book for helping her 'establish' Detroit. Academia props!
I liked this book enough, but not as much as the previous two books. I give it 7.5/10.
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