The eccentric Mace family believes that the Philadelphia rowhouse they’ve lived in for decades is built on sacred ground, and that the space enhances the clairvoyance passed down to them through generations. But developers, viewing the family’s lifestyle an impediment to gentrification efforts, begin a campaign to displace them. Meanwhile, a prodigal daughter’s return deepens family schisms and exposes betrayals. Can she also help them battle the havoc, both internal and external, that would ruin them?

The Maces believe that a clairvoyant gene, they refer to as the knowing, has been passed down in their family to at least one girl child in every generation from as far back as they can trace—they claim Harriet Tubman in their family tree. Main character Lil, considered the most gifted of her generation, has returned to Philadelphia for cancer treatment. Lil is painfully estranged from her mother and aunts and cousins. Decades ago, after too much brandy and cocaine, Lil acquiesces to her boyfriends’ request to prove her clairvoyance by advising him on a business venture. Doing so, Lil violates a sacred family code because the Maces believe a knowing is an act of community where they agree through storytelling and rituals that invoke the ancestors, that their prognostications contribute to a greater good. Lil’s boyfriend benefits from her breach of faith and in an act of gratitude—and exploitation—books Lil on the Mike Douglass show. Lil’s mother and grandmother are mortified as they watch Lil predict trivialities in a game-like format for some fawning white man, making a mockery of their sacrosanct practice. They sever all contact with Lil and ban her from the family home.

Lil becomes a media darling for a time after her appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, and since then has been paid handsomely as a consultant, advisor, counselor, coach, or similar titles that legitimate entities use to obscure that they’re paying for fortunetelling.

Lil has remained close with her brother Miles and when she returns to Philadelphia, settles into the chaos of his household. Miles is an aspiring novelist in search of a book deal; Mile’s wife Jetta, a once local model, is now trying her hand at interior decorating. Jetta and Miles are teetertottering on Bankruptcy, their marriage is disintegrating, and they can’t agree on how to help their twenty-one-year-old daughter Ayana work through her issues. Lil offers Miles and Jetta money and advice, but she primarily concentrates on Ayana in whom she recognizes her younger self.

Ayana is back home with her parents following an abysmal six years trying to finish college. After a dearth of girl babies on her father’s side, she feels pressured to manifest and carry on the family gift. She’s conflicted. Her entire life, her mother, who doesn’t believe in a clairvoyant gene, has tried to persuade Ayana that she is not like the Maces. Though Ayana craves a normal life and wishes Jetta was right, she knows that she is very much like her father’s people. Plus, she adores them with their unapologetic authenticity, and color-clashing outfits, and free-standing crinkly hair.  She loves the stories her grandmother tells about the ancestors, bringing them to life. She especially loves the rituals.

Still, Ayana pretends to her family that the knowing gene has bypassed her, disappointing her grandmother and aunts, greatly relieving her mother, and causing Ayana enormous guilt. She distracts herself from the guilt by jumping in and out of relationships. Her latest guy lives in his car.

More complications arise for Ayana when she thinks she experiences a knowing about Lil’s treatment and doesn’t want to out herself by exposing it.

Meanwhile, the man who exploited Lil years ago has also returned to Philly after a lucrative run as a Black man purveying anti-Black rhetoric. He again contacts Lil for help. As appalled as she is by his brazenness, she considers his appeal an opportunity to right her past wrong and pave a way back home to her mother. She tussles with whether and how to bring him down as she prepares to start her cancer treatment. Ayana begs her to get a second opinion, and Lil relents and discovers the radiologist’s error, and Ayana’s deceit.

Ayana’s unhoused boyfriend learns through his internship with a gentrifying housing development corporation that a campaign is underway to remove Ayana’s grandmother, aunts, and cousins from the home they’ve occupied for decades. The threat fuels the internal struggles of the main characters. Ayana, just trying to live a normal life, and Lil, just trying to keep living, become a formidable duo in the climactic battle to save the family home, their block, their culture, and their traditions.

Each chapter of Family Spirit opens with a text message thread that captures the chapter’s focus—hence the title Family Spirit. Told in an omniscient voice, and primarily set in the current day, Family Spirit dips into the past with depictions of enslaved ancestors through the stories Ayana’s grandmother tells.