Francis and Viola Turner left Arkansas in the 1940s to find opportunity in the bustling city of Detroit. They eventually settled into a house on the east side and raised a family of thirteen children. The Turner House tells the story of their family, from Francis’s first trip north during the War, to the 2008 housing crisis, when the adult Turner siblings realize their parents’ house is worth a pittance of what it had been refinanced for the decade before.
While the Turners struggle with the decision of whether or not to give their childhood home back to the bank, they also deal with family secrets and their own destructive impulses. Each sibling has to come to terms with how much the neighborhood (and the city) has changed around them.
It’s like a slightly-more interconnected, Detroit-flavored, version of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.
Reviewed by Lynn Heitkamp
