#Model Home

[aroaessidhe]

faves of 2024: adult horror (/paranormal/gothic)

Dehiscent

Graveyard Shift

Walking Practice

What Feasts At Night

Model Home

Small Gods of Calamity

Grievers

Bury Your Gays

Lacrimore

[evan-collins90]

Found this book filled with elaborate model home interiors from the late 1970's in California, designed by Beverly Trupp & her firm, Color Design Art Inc.

Scanned from 'Color It Home: A Builder's Guide to Interior Design and Merchandising' by Beverly Trupp (1981)

[myriad--starlings]

Can the cellar that a kidnapper throws a child into be guilty or innocent? The lake that a killer drowns his women in? I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.

— Model Home, Rivers Solomon

[harrowharrks]

my favourites despite a mediocre reading year

[readingtillmidnight]

FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2024

Top 15 (in order of reading)

Someone You Can Build a Nest In

He Who Drowned the World

The West Passage

A Darker Shade of Magic

Piranesi

Compound Fracture

Babel

This Fatal Kiss

The Black Hunger

Model Home

The Atlas Six

Sorcery and Small Magics

Extremophile

Record of a Spaceborn Few

The Maid and the Crocodile

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

YA FANTASY

Sheine Lende

Dark Heir

The Worst Perfect Moment

Redemptor

Gwen & Art are Not in Love

The Legend of the White Snake

ADULT FANTASY

A Power Unbound

Saint Death's Daughter

The Sins on Their Bones

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

The Saint of Bright Doors

The City in Glass

YA CONTEMPORARY/ROMANCE

Skater Boy

Twelfth Knight

I Wish You All the Best

Felix Ever After

Fake Dates and Mooncakes

SCIENCE FICTION

Network Effect

A Closed and Common Orbit

A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

Key Lime Sky

HORROR

Take All of Us

Summer Sons

The Eyes are the Best Part

These Fleeting Shadows

NOVELLAS

The Black God's Drums

Thornhedge

Time's Agent

GRAPHIC NOVELS

The Prince and the Dressmaker

Superman Smashes the Klan

The Princess and the Grilled Cheese Sandwich

The Tea Dragon Society + The Tea Dragon Festival

[beegoould]

Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.

- Model Home by Rivers Solomon

[transbookoftheday]

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

Welcome to Rivers Solomon's dark and wondrous Model Home, a new kind of haunted-house novel.

The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.

As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural” death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?

Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.

[lgbtqreads]

Fave Five: Queer Literary Fiction about Grief and Mourning

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi Some Hell by Patrick Nathan Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke Bonus: Coming next month, Model Home by Rivers Solomon

[untalented-but-opinionated]

Books I Read In 2025: Model Home by Rivers Solomon

Maybe my mother is God, and that's why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that's why even though she's never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.

[aroaessidhe]

read in 2024: autistic MCs

Compound Fracture

Key Lime Sky

Party of Fools

Model Home

Junker Seven

Daniel, Deconstructed

The Reanimator’s Heart

The Evolving Truth of Ever-Stronger Will

How To Sell Your Blood And Fall In Love

[actualcryptidbeckreads]

[myriad--starlings]

How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.

— Model Home, Rivers Solomon

[feywildfancypants]

Model Home by Rivers Solomon was okay for me. Any lackluster feelings stem more from my hesitance with genre rather than the book itself. Horror really is not my thing, but I think this is an important and well done iteration.

This book teeters on the edge between paranormal horror and realistic horror, one moment convinced of a haunting and the next questioning the POV character's perception of reality. Maybe it's easier to live in a spooky story than the realities of the hatred from others. I think the most horrifying part if this books isn't the ending, but the fact that it's believable.

This book is heartbreaking on a lot of levels. It really digs in to what it means to be a parent with trauma, who isn't sure of the space they take up in the world and is still unravelling their traumas from the past-- The desire to do better while being held back by your own injuries. It also discusses the complexity and resilience of siblings, as well as the horrors of racism in the US.

Sometimes the prose itself lost me a little, but there are a lot of ways Ezri is a real breathing person, a painfully honest example of parenting with mental health issues. I love a story with a nonbinary parent lead. This is where it's hard for me because I think the tone of the book fits the POC character, Ezri, so well. I also didn't love it. It's one I'd recommend to horror fans but not one I'll reread.

[readingtillmidnight]

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

Release date: 1 October 2024

Genre: adult literary thriller/horror

Synopsis

The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.

As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a "natural" death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?

Review

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC!

This book is awful.

Don't get me wrong, this is a brilliant novel, but I found the reading experience to be really difficult. Not that I struggled to keep reading; I couldn't put it down. This book took a toll on me mentally as it went to some pretty dark places, some of which I did not see coming.

The writing is in the typical sort of litfic style, which I am usually not a fan of, but it really works to cultivate the overall mood/atmosphere of the book. The prose flows well, and strikes a fine balance between being complex but still readable.

The author uses the haunted house novel as a vehicle to explore themes of white supremacy, generational trauma, and cisheteronormativity. I am not smart enough to get everything, but the author does an excellent job of conveying the themes in the narrative.

There are time jumps, switching between the present day and scenes from Ezri's childhood, as well as dialogue without quotation marks, which were disorienting to read, but served the narrative well, as it conveyed their current mindset.

I really resonated with Ezri's relationship with their mother, as well as the themes of generational trauma; while my relationship to my mother is much better than their's, there were certain moments between them that I found quite relatable.

I read some reviews that didn't like the plot, or the ending; while there is definitely a large tonal shift at the end, due to the plot, I think that it makes sense thematically.

Overall, a book that is definitely going to be staying with me for some time.

Content warnings

I'm including the content warnings at the bottom of this review, as it contains spoilers; however, if you struggle with dark themes and difficult subject matter, I would advice that you check the content warnings before reading this book.

Keep in mind that I may have missed out certain warnings.

Death, suicide

Child abuse, emotional abuse

Homophobia, transphobia, slurs

Child sexual assault, grooming

Explicit sexual content

Animal death

Mental illness, depression, dissociation, suicidal thoughts

Chronic illness

Threat of gun violence

Racism, classism

Vomit

Disordered eating

Gaslighting

[wolfythoughts]

Book Review: Model Home by Rivers Solomon

When Ezri’s parents die under mysterious circumstances, they return to their Texan childhood home—possibly haunted—in a gated community where their family is the only Black family. Summary:The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The…

[ninsiana0]

Read MODEL HOME by Rivers Solomon if you love quintessential queer black literature, haunted houses, fractured families, sprawling suburbs, loving cups of tea, gut-punching prose, late night sanctuary diners, Jenny Holzer's Abuse of Power, Mothers, dissociating, running away & the unexplainable.