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The Turner House
By Angela Flournoy
Houghton Mifflin, Hardcover, 9780544303164, April 2015, 352pp.

The Short of It:

What makes a house a home?

The Rest of It:

The house on Yarrow Street, once a thriving hub for thirteen children in the middle of Detroit’s crumbling East Side, has seen its members come and go for over fifty years. Now, falling apart and worth much less than what they paid for it, the family is forced to sell it back to the bank.

I really enjoyed this flawed family. Granted, there are a lot of characters in this story to keep track of and I’m not sure that all of their stories were as interesting as some, but the gambling addiction of the youngest sibling was particularly interesting to me as was the “haint” or ghostly apparition that the oldest sibling grew up with.

When you’ve lived in a house for as long as the Turners have, it’s impossible to not have feelings about it even when the neighborhood around it has gone to hell. And how many times have we been willing to let something go only to change our minds once the sale sign is up? It just seems so final, right?

That is the case here but this isn’t a sad, sappy story about losing a home. It’s much more subtle in the telling. Flournoy focuses on the flaws of each family member, allowing the reader to get to know them a little, see the home from their eyes, walk in their shoes, etc.

For me, it took me a little while to get into the story but once I did, I found that I really enjoyed it. It was a National Book Award finalist and extremely well-received when it debuted. Have you read it?

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

The Dogs of Littlefield
By Suzanne Berne
Simon & Schuster, Hardcover, 9781476794242, January 2016, 288pp.

The Short of It:

Perfect suburban neighborhoods are anything but perfect.

The Rest of It:

Littlefield, Massachusetts, is this perfect little town filled with psychologists and professors, wide open spaces and dogs, lots of dogs. But as perfect as it sounds, the dogs are off-leash and the neighborhood is divided over whether to allow them to continue to go off-leash or to impose leash laws. In the middle of this debate, someone is poisoning dogs one by one which has set the entire neighborhood on edge.

On the surface, there is a lot of dog talk but really, as with any suburban neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else or at least seems to think they know everything about everyone else, there is a lot of conflict between husbands and wives, friends, etc. The white picket fences are just an illusion, really.

However, what could have been a really strong read was really just okay in my book. Halfway through, the story seemed to lose steam even though there was still plenty to know about what was going on in the neighborhood. But Berne’s depiction of suburbia was pretty spot-on and that is what carried me through.

In the end, I enjoyed getting to know a new author but wish that the pacing had held up a little better.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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