Like a modern soap opera informed by race, class, patriotism, and privilege, Dawn Turner’s Majestic Hills effortlessly skirts the boundary between gripping fiction and historical reckoning. Set in Chicago and outer Chicagoland, a place I know and love, and am always happy to see as deftly depicted as it is here, this modern fable follows a Midwestern couple seeking greener pastures and a victory garden.
The Blaques need an escape: a respite from the tragedies of a busy Chicago hospital, relief from thirty-inch gangways, neighborhood noise, and the random violence of the vibrant city they love and know. Langdon Blaque, an attending physician in a busy inner-city hospital, is haunted by what he’s seen and needs out. His wife, Josephine, a successful attorney, is still deliberating. His eyes, at least, are set on a slice of paradise just past the lone farmhouses surrounded by cornfield islands—the promise of something new, different, better. The Blaques’ dream home sits in the shadow of displaced Indigenous settlers and the residents of the Grand Vistas trailer park, left behind by industry and time. Their poverty is as real as the Majestic Hills residents’ wealth.
The Blaques are plagued with questions after they make the move. They aren’t sure if their fear is justified, or is it a bouquet of anxiety, apprehension, and intuition in bloom? Are their senses clouded or cleared by the fresh air filled with ragweed, moisture, and native grasses of the open land? Is their new neighbor, one of “them,” or is he simply cut from the oblivious cloth of white people who mean no harm but offer no comfort either? Can the woman who runs the town store be trusted? The Klan may be around the corner, or the neighbors may just keep bees. Everyone is making assumptions, and blatant racism gets excused as white privilege and indifference. But the farmers market is booming and the pollinators prevail.
Nuanced and likable, Josephine propels the novel through her inner world, glimpsed early on in a line from William Blake kept on her nightstand: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” It is Josephine who carries us through the deep fabric of what’s ahead and what underpins the novel’s anxiety about the unknown—and its several awful accidents. Her life is portrayed through the parts that matter: love, passion, fear, anxiety, knowing. She and her husband are center stage in the life they have chosen and desire rules the roost, as Mr. Blake said.
The novel is peppered with soulful music spanning generations of American history, snippets of heroes like Frederick Douglass, and forgotten history. The shifting ground beneath the new development—which, we’re told, was “built on a lie,” threatens to erode it all into oblivion. An imaginary pipeline connects the residents of the new development to the trailer park down the river, and an actual proposed pipeline strains neighborhood relations and threatens to send the flood water through easements and PVC.
Will it all wash away, or will the development prosper in its newness, the racist, gun-happy neighbors coming around—evolving over time, or is the worst of them and what is feared the only truth to be had? The questions continue as crushes develop, and trespassing, vandalism, criminal charges, and gunshots bring everything the Blaques fled right back into their backyard, now a peaceful pond view. You can taste the Costco appetizers—and the tension—on the Fourth of July.
As the story unfolds, the rich fabric of shared history collides with the dividing lens of individual opinion, and everyone grows afraid of what is to come. Majestic Hills is full of assumptions and misinterpretations as The Blaques make friends, find foes, and grapple with distance from their roots. The power of assumption—the reader’s as much as the characters’—runs through the neighborhood gatherings—this power judges and classifies and simplifies the residents. Pervasive gun culture, property law, the joys of homeownership, and racially charged suspicion circulate through this neighborhood tale in modern America and provide a backdrop for profound questions.
What we see and assume at first is not always what is, but fear of the other, of the unknown, may propel us into action in line with our worst selves and divides people who would otherwise live in harmony. Turner articulates this universal human anxiety—this fear—using a cast of characters who represent voices too often silenced in dominant culture.
We live in a country divided by fear of the unknown, and this novel rests squarely in that public atmosphere.
Several nuanced and diverse viewpoints serve up this story—we flip between each member of the couple, the storekeeper, the son, and those they interact with. It’s a quick, dialogue-heavy story, and the reader has to keep up with who’s speaking and what emotions and observations are left unsaid to understand the action. There are twists, but this is a mild thriller—a perfect read for a leisurely afternoon when you want to think about what divides our nation while getting carried away by the town’s story and its players.
I found myself wanting the hidden parts of Turner’s characters developed even further—I wanted more of the unspoken dreams of ancestors, the buried prosperity, the desperate grief, and the creative idealism of youth. I wanted the action to slow down so I could sit with the people in the scene. I floated as I read, and my mind kept working after I laid the book to rest.
When every place turns up the same, and the joys and ruins of life keep happening, how do we keep dancing, keep loving, when the pain runs so deep and the divide is so clear? Is it noble and just to shoulder blame for someone less equipped to solve the problem they created, even at the cost of one’s own future? Does it matter what color we are if one has the privilege and one has the curse? Class and race divisions soften a bit when the focus is on our universal human concerns; and generosity, friendship, kinship, love, and forgiveness close the chasm a bit in Majestic Hills.
Turner invigorated me as a reader—through artfully composed vignettes of dancing, loving, wondering, and grieving. Through the loss of the known and the familiar, we journey with the people of Majestic Hills, into territory we think we already know. The stain of ancestral pain, human cruelty, and the unspoken violence of oppression envelop the novel and deepen the joy found in warm moments of music, rain, and laughter. We can’t escape other humans, unfortunately—as no matter where we go, the poor decisions and choices of ourselves and others collide. But it’s also joyful to be human at times, and Dawn Turner delivers the full human experience with this captivating and thoughtful novel.
FICTION
Majestic Hills
By Dawn Turner
Scribner
Published August 4, 2026
