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Content snapshot
Flag an inaccuracy →What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.
Violence
Barely any
Minimal
Language
A lot
Naturalistic Detroit vernacular with profanity in the sibling dialogue — reviewers praise it as authentic rather than caricatured
Sexual Content
Some
Adult relationships, an affair, and the fallout from them, described without explicit detail
Substance Use
A lot
Lelah's compulsive gambling drives the plot and costs her housing and her relationship with her daughter; drinking runs through the family scenes
Emotional Intensity
Very heavy
Eviction and homelessness, a fractured mother-daughter bond, an aging matriarch's decline, and Cha-Cha's ghost — which the family treats as either a spiritual reality or a mental-health crisis, and the novel refuses to settle
What this book is about
Flournoy's National Book Award-finalist debut follows the Turners as the family home is worth a tenth of what is owed on it. Kirkus centers three siblings: Cha-Cha, who sees a luminous ghost and crashes his truck; Lelah, evicted because of a gambling addiction; and Troy, a disillusioned cop with a scheme. The review quotes Lelah's compulsion directly — "the chips looked like candy. Pastel, melt-away things that didn't make sense to save" — and readers on StoryGraph flag the gambling sequences as genuinely anxiety-inducing. Reviewers praise the authentic African American vernacular of the dialogue. There is no graphic violence or sex here; the pressure is financial, familial, and psychological.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
Compulsive gambling addiction and eviction
A possible haunting treated as possible mental illness
Financial collapse and family estrangement
Reader Verification
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