Basically, I left my dream,” 25-year-old Lia Cope tells us early in Amanda Churchill’s debut novel, The Turtle House. “I left live music and tacos and my sweet, goofy roommate.… I thought I had everything figured out.” It’s shortly before the turn of the millennium, and she has quit her job at an Austin architecture firm to return to her hometown, the fictional Curtain, Texas. Why would she—why would anyone—give up their dream, especially in so rarefied a field? This is what Lia’s grandmother Mineko wants to know, not least because the two of them are sharing Lia’s old room in her parents’ home.
Mineko, brash and frankly delightful at age 73, is living with her son’s family because her own house has recently burned down. The most obvious thing she and Lia have in common is that they’re in limbo: not quite at home, even with family, futures uncertain, with elements of their past, perforce or by choice, cut off.
Lia and Mineko have never been particularly close, but becoming roommates changes their relationship for the better. This newfound intimacy surprises and pleases both. Mineko begins to confide in Lia, asking her to record the stories she shares, and although Lia has no idea where—if anywhere—all this might lead, she’s happy to oblige. And why not? The only other thing she’s doing back at home is working at a gift-wrap and tchotchke store.
In this way, The Turtle House alternates between Lia’s contemporary narrative, which spans just over a month in 1999 and is interwoven with memories of her time in the architecture program at the University of Texas, Austin, and Mineko’s memories, which take us from Japan in 1936 to the night of the fire that destroyed her Texas home.
Refreshingly, the two storylines don’t neatly overlap or mirror each other exactly. The experiences they detail are entirely different, and Churchill allows them to unfold without trying to shoehorn unconvincing or unnecessary parallels. This isn’t to say there’s no relationship between the narratives, but it’s subtle and has more to do with our emotional response than with the material itself.
Mineko discovers the turtle house of the novel’s title while living in Kadoma, Osaka Prefecture. She is 10 when her best friend Fumiko—also the daughter of her family’s housekeeper—tells her about a supposedly haunted house. Once Mineko sees it, she’s enchanted: “At the granite steps, she looked up and saw a beautiful kawara staring back at her, a minogame turtle with its bushy seaweed tail sculpted behind it, as if floating through the water.… Unlike some she had seen before with menacing mouths, this one had a slight feminine smile, more mischievous than evil.… The word turtle was in her surname, after all.”
The minogame, Mineko explains to Lia, symbolizes “so much luck. Such a long life in turtles. They carry their homes on their backs! And this, this tail is moss because the turtle is old.” As Mineko’s life continues, the minogame grows to be far more than culturally symbolic, however; it becomes a prized memory of her former home in Kadoma, as well as the love of her life and the terrible losses and shame she endured during and just after World War II.
While Mineko waxes nostalgic, sharing her love for the turtle house—which became a refuge during her unruly childhood—Lia tries to keep her memories to herself. Yet they rise up regardless of how she seeks to suppress them, and it becomes clear that whatever she went through in Austin had to do with a college professor named Darren Miles. Hers is an unfortunately common narrative, and many readers will recognize its contours long before Lia recounts them, but this doesn’t detract from her pain and the avoidance to which she clings.
As the novel progresses, we learn how both Mineko and Lia have arrived at where they are, and this unspooling of past mysteries supplies much of the momentum. But the beating heart of the book is Mineko’s drive for independence and freedom, for which she has to fight again and again. As a child, she’s too much of a wild card for her mother; as a young woman, too much of a real person—as opposed to merely a wife—for her husband; as an elder, too much for her son. At every turn, though, she finds a way to hold her own.
The Turtle House is an intergenerational story, yes, but instead of centering on inherited traumas, it focuses, rather, on the potential for strength and resilience in an uncontrollable world. Mineko doesn’t set out to teach Lia any grand lesson, but she nevertheless becomes an inspiration, the details of her past providing a blueprint, of sorts, for Lia to find her way back to her own dreams, as well.•
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. Masad is the author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers and is co-editing a forthcoming anthology about The Bachelor franchise. Her new novel, Beings, comes out in September 2025.
