An interesting and unusual premise; an enjoyable Penguin Reads pick.

I found this book slow to start with but then really did get drawn in to the eerie atmosphere throughout and the dramatic, tragic family narrative.

There was one scene that I found unnecessarily explicit and crass which I personally didn't feel added to the plot or character development, However, the overall story and its ending was both thought provoking and haunting (metaphorically and literally)!

Thanks to Penguin Random House (Merky Books) and NetGalley for access to this book as part of the quarterly Penguin Reads for staff.

A visceral and harrowing book, where characters are incredibly textured and complex. I can't say I enjoyed my time reading it, as it touches on many disturbing issues, but they were handled with care and explored deeply. There is a sense of dread and wrongness permeating the book's every page. The writing was really good, the mystery compelling although I sensed the ending, it didn't take away from its impact. A powerful story of sibling love persevering through difficult circumstances. I loved exploring them as individuals, their dynamic as a group and the impact on the next generation. If you can handle the subject matter, it'd strongly recommend this read.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC.

4.25/5

Model Home is a short and powerful gut punch of a book. It's beautifully told and incredibly dark and so, so heavy. Please check the content warnings!
In their haunted family home, three siblings discover their dead parents and are left alone with the weight of their childhood. We look into their pasts, into the home that was never truly a home to them—a structure that could not shelter them, a building that would not protect them. Here, we discover a nauseating and harrowing history. Here, we see the ghosts that still puppet their present. Here, we glimpse reflections of the characters that they cannot escape.

What is a home when it is not a home? I suppose it is this. Empty, full of dead things, or things better left buried. Through poetic prose, Solomon navigates a difficult and daunting tale with compassion, empathy and intelligent insight. The characters are unfailingly human, messy and flawed and so very complicated, yet they hold so much love within them. They are siblings and share that unique, complex bond. They are parents, desperately trying not to repeat the mistakes made before them. They are children still, clinging to each other and afraid. It is this complete dissection, it is the characters laid bare before us, that makes them so very real and so skilfully written. Solomon is an author I trust and has proven that fact once again.

Haunting is the word that I think best describes this book. It's the word that comes to mind over and over again. It holds true that they can never leave the darkness of their childhood home behind, no matter how far away they move, no matter who they become. It is an incredibly dark book and is immensely hard to read at times, but it is poignant and cutting. And, despite it all, there is that bond of family that runs throughout it all. That promise that no matter how they hurt, no matter what they say or do, they will hold each other and breathe back the life that gutters out.

I adore Southern horror as it is a horror rooted in much deeper themes. I adore queer and trans horror for the same reason. Horror books that explore their themes cleverly always make for better books, in my opinion. Horror used as a metaphor can create the most hard-hitting stories you've ever read. Such a horror is Model Home.

I cannot stress enough to please, please, please check the trigger warnings! This book explores some incredibly dark topics and traumas. But if you are so able, this book is one that will stick with you. It will grip onto your chest, awful and human. It is such a show of skill and important storytelling. This is certainly not a book for everyone but, if it is for you, it'll be one you won't ever forget.

Thank you Merky Books and Netgalley for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

This book follows Ezri, the eldest of three siblings that grew up in Oak Creek Estate, an affluent gated community in Dallas, Texas. The siblings are getting together as their parents have been found dead in their mansion. This home was always considered haunted due to all the incidents that happened to the family at that residence. Ezri has grown up into a damaged and reckless adult; they do things that put them at risk and don't have the will to change things in their life. They are like this largely due to the things they experienced growing up. The siblings return leads to the truth about the hauntings coming to light. Overall, a hard-hitting book tackling: racism, child-abuse, mental health, PTSD, parental dynamics of some households and sibling-parent relationships. I would recommend to readers that liked "The Trees" by Percival Everett.

Disclaimer: I received this eARC from NetGalley and Random House UK, Cornerstone | Merky Books in exchange for a free and honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley for this e-copy.

I really struggled with this one. From the get go, I was simply confused and every subsequent sentence made me even more confused! The blurb felt so distant from the actual writing/content, at least for the beginning, because unfortunately I had to DNF (did not finish) this because I simply could not make sense of it and found it so hard to read - each sentence required great effort to comprehend and felt so disconnected/disjointed for me. It might have picked up but simply put, I did not enjoy it enough to invest more time into it and felt relieved letting it go, which I think says a lot! I have seen this type of poetic, supernatural/fantastical/slightly non-sensical, mysterious type of story pop up more and more and unfortunately I am not a fan! The blurb had me intrigued but I could not wrap my head around the actual story. This might just be a case of it not being for me, because I genuinely think if the blurb holds up toward the end of the book or things come together, the story could be interesting and the writing is objectively not bad, I just don't like stories that are so confusing. I kept thinking something was going to make sense but all these supernatural events mixed with real interactions mixed with the horror setting just did not come together for me at all.

Obviously seeing as I DNF’ed this, the 1 star only applies to what I have read and is to be taken with a grain of salt! This might be just the thing for you.

Utterly heartbreaking. I couldn’t have guessed where this was going but it genuinely made me feel equal parts distraught and ill. The kind of book that settles in your chest, in your stomach. I’ve been meaning to read this author’s work for quite some time and I’m glad I finally got around to it.

I strongly recommend looking at the trigger warnings before diving in.

If you like endings that wrap a story up well then this would have been a five star, but sometimes I like a little ambiguity, especially with a book as unusual as this one. Still a remarkable reading experience and a wonderful use of language and metaphor. Literary horror lovers will be obsessed.

I recommend going into this experience as blind as possible. The author had me guessing what was about to happen for almost the entire book and still managed to surprise me at the end. A horror story unlike anything I have ever read. Simply awesome!

I really enjoyed this dark, gothic and twisty tale that reminded me of some of the great novels of the genre in the past. It’s not something I normally read but I’m so glad I did. Brilliant.

It took me longer to get to this book than I’d intended and honestly? Jokes on me. This book was brilliant and so not what I had expected it would be — it’s one of those haunted house stories that’s deeply rooted in family trauma and grief, and moves beyond the classical haunted house tropes.

Model Home is about coming back to a house and neighbourhood you were never welcome in and maybe finally coming to terms with your childhood trauma.

It’s extremely political, queer, and so so relevant in today’s political climate. I don’t think I can honestly get into the story, beyond the above description, without spoiling it completely. But I’d fully recommend it for people who enjoyed Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt or The Day of the Door by Laurel Hightower — or anyone who is looking for an allegorical haunted house story.

There’s themes of queerness, racism and its deeply rooted structures, mental illness, familial relationships and generational trauma.

It’s my first Rivers Solomon, but it won’t be my last, and I’m already excited to delve into their other work!

/// Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!

This was a twisted tale of abuse, survival and how our brains try to rationalise traumatic events that happened in our childhood. It's also a look at identity and how it warps our sense of self. Our egos to maintain an image can be our own downfall. It is an unrelenting tale with some positively lyrical verses.

Don't trust anyone, and not yourself.

This book starts off as a book about a haunted house. But knowing Rivers Solomon their work however I knew there was going to be a deeper story underneath and indeed there was.

The main character is a very flawed character. At one point they summarize all of their diagnosis in frustration and damn it was a lot. And they weren't just diagnoses that are looked upon with sympaty. The diagnoses they had among others were BPD (borderline personality disorder), OSDD (otherwise specified dissociative disorder) and NPD (narcissistic personality disorder). These are diagnoses that have a lot of negativity and stigma in the public opinion. The book declaring them this openly and showing a flawed character but underneath all of that is still very human and worthy of compassion, meant a lot to me. I recently got the BDP diagnosis and I am struggling to figure out what it means for me. Googling feels way too scary with all the negativity online so I hope to get more education soon. The book shows this flawed character having struggled with these things for a long while though, and you can see them work through their feelings with methods they've learned in therapy, therapy that they're still actively having during the book. This book to me really shows that yes some people are flawed and do horrible things, but everyone is still human and deserves compassion.

For the plot itself so much was always going on, but the book kept everything feeling very down to earth. We slowly get to know more and more that has happened in the house and over time the bigger picture starts forming. We get to see a lot from the main characters perspective in flashbacks but also through stories with their sisters. The way the plot progressed really had me on the edge of my seat at all times. Every little fact uncovered kept making the book more intense and gripping. When everything comes together at the end I was floored. In hindsight I should've seen it coming although I know I often don't even if the foreshadowing is plenty. But damn was that ending done well and it kept me thinking about the book for a while.

This book talks about heavy topics like racism as Solomon's books usually do. I love it how they are able to shine light on so many aspects of racism with books that in setting have big contrasts. Every new book of theirs I'm thrown in a different world that hooks me into it hard but also keeps forever lingering in my brain. This book is no exception, so if you like their work I would highly recommend reading Model Home as well.

Model Home is a book that grips you from the first page and doesn’t let go. If I stopped reading, it was because I was interrupted, not because I felt like it. If I may borrow the titular metaphor from the movie Glass Onion, it is a glass onion peeling back its layers only to reveal what you’ve been able to see all along. A discovery of infinitely refracting patterns. What is a haunting?

When I was six, I lay down for a nap on the couch and woke up inside the oven. Mother is God. I’m Sodom and Gomorrah. No ounce of good left in me. Run.

At the start of the novel, Ezri and her sisters have all moved away from the house that haunted their childhood, have escaped and shaped their lives each in their own ways. Ezri even moved all the way to England. None of them remained unscathed. With all the distance and therapy, trauma still has its claws in all of them.

BPD (borderline personality disorder), OSDD (other specific dissociative disorder), NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), C(omplex)-PTSD, and GAD (generalized anxiety disorder). All those letters, but they spell only one thing: hole.

Upon the news of their parents’ sudden deaths, the three siblings reunite to deal with the aftermath. As the story unfolds, you learn more about what happened to them in their family home. Racist neighbours; a steadfast mother not even pushing, but simply expecting her kids to excel; strange, unexplainable happenings further mystified by gaps in memory and the twisting uncertainty that comes with remembering through time and trauma.

I promise I am learning. I am learning not to eat. I am learning to become a sliver.

Is this the story of a Black family being bullied out of a white neighbourhood, one haunted by a malignant presence, or both? (Is there a difference?) Did their mother hurt her children with her expectation of perfection, or did she stimulate them to get ahead in a racist world? What can be made of Ezri, Eve and Emanuelle’s differing perceptions of the past?

Who is the Nightmare Mother?

I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.

What is clear is that this is a story about family, about the possibility of healing from complex and intergenerational trauma, about the lasting effects of child abuse, the moldability of self. It is a plural, queer, Black, neurodivergent story. It reveals that sometimes, the mundane is infinitely worse than the supernatural. That everything is always more and less complex than it seems.

If I cannot forget, what is there? I am always remembering, even when I am not. Me is in itself a remembrance. Me does not exist without the past that shaped my being. And what is there between memory and forgetting? Today?

I want everyone to read this book. Read it if you like psychological horror, read it if you’re interested in horror but are a bit scared, read it if the themes speak to you and you’d like to read something at the intersection of horror and literary fiction. Just read it!

Model Home is the fourth novel by award-winning American author, Rivers Solomon. When Ezri Washington Maxwell gets a text from their Mama’s phone that reads “Children, I miss your screams. Come play.” they know it’s from the Nightmare Mother, the Ghost Mother, the woman without a face in the attic, the reason they left the family’s north Dallas gated community, where they were the only Black family, eighteen years earlier and fled to England. They share the message with their sisters back in Texas, Eve and Emmanuelle.

Ezri already understands that “It’s stupid to run from pain instead of to it because pain always comes, and if I could just accept that, life would not be a constant fluctuation between numbness and fear.”

Calls and texts to their parents have gone unanswered, and Eve comes straight back with a demand that they return home. Soon Ezri is on a plane with their fourteen-year-old daughter, Elijah. It’s Ezri who is sent to 677 Acacia Drive in Oak Creek Estates to do a welfare check on their Mama and Pop. They’re not in the house, but they are on the property, deceased, and while it looks like a murder/suicide, Ezri knows it isn’t: the house killed them, the house that terrorised them all throughout their childhood.

“A family hurts. It does. We are born in its noose.” How they came to live there, what happened to them, and why their parents didn’t pack up their family and leave, is gradually revealed in discussions between the siblings, extracts of Ezri’s therapy sessions and the flashbacks to the siblings’ childhoods, which are distinguished by the irritating feature of lacking quote marks for speech.

Solomon includes some dark themes in the story and their protagonist makes some puzzling choices, indulging in risky behaviour, and their care of Elijah comes under critical scrutiny. Most of the narrative is carried by Ezri, with Elijah taking a minor role, and it becomes gradually apparent that Ezri’s might not be entirely reliable. There are a few twists and surprises before the resolution. A thought-provoking and challenging read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Random House UK Cornerstone

This writting in this is absolutely gorgeous from the very first line. As a piece of art, I found it haunting and intense yet beautiful. As a work of fiction it engaged me less. I felt I found what I needed from it in the first section but was never quite rooted in the story. But the characterisation of home and family was gripping. A strange reading experience that will definitely speak to some.

This was a shocking, intense and disturbing book, but utterly compelling. I just couldn't stop reading it and am looking forward to reading more books by Rivers Solomon.

Unfortunately this one didn't work for me. I struggled with the style, narrative voice, themes and characters. I love the premise and there is so much potential in the story but right now unfortunately it didn't land for me.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House UK, Cornerstone | Merky Books for this digital review copy of "Model Home" in exchange for my honest and voluntary review.

I always wanted to read something by Rivers Solomon and am very grateful for this ARC!

It was a strange reading experience like a roller coster. There were many things I liked - the representation and the family dynamic - but also things that felt like to much for me (Ezras way of coping with hookups).

The beginning had me gripped right away. The intensity of the mysterious nightmare mother and how instantly the relationship between the siblings was characterized made me very hopeful for this horror novel. But I had to adapt to the fact that the book isn't as much classic horror as it is the inner workings of the horror the siblings had to live through and how they cope - or don't. That took me a while and additionally to the fact that I had a hard time with some of Ezras decisions I felt like the middle of the book dragged a little.

I loved how the solution to the horror was described because it broke my heart. It made the double meaning of the title equally heart breaking because it wasn't important how much Ezras parents wanted to be a model home family - they were never wanted and were sabotaged from the first moment on. It was only as devastating that Ezra had to work through the realization that she was "guilty" for all the horror. Even if a child should never feel guilty for the twisted ways of adults.

I definitely want to read more by Rivers Solomon!

What makes a haunted house?
Is it the people in it (dead or alive) or the structure of the house itself?
A model home in a wealthy and mainly white gated community is the last type of structure you’d imagine as a house of possible supernatural horror on an Amityville level. But when three siblings find out that their parents are dead of an apparent murder-suicide, a litany of house-related horrors are slowly unfurled as we learn about their traumatic childhood at the hands of their perfectionist mother and the aspirational show home they grew up in.

There’s some seriously blurred lines here between family trauma, being the only family of colour in a white affluent area and the actual house itself. Was the supernatural torture inflicted by the faceless woman/Nightmare Mother or is their mother the bodily incarnation of the horror? And then dissociative episodes and Munchausen by Proxy are mentioned, which adds more confusion to the pot!

There are some seriously creepy incidents mentioned - the boy who is dared to stay in the house for 30 minutes and then completely disappears (freakier still is the fact that no one knows who this kid is and no one appears to be missing him) and the dead ants from a ghostly-shattered ant farm that are found spelling out the word ‘hi’ on the kitchen floor hours later.
But even so, there’s that continuous questioning of ‘is something more human causing these incidents?’
Either way, very disturbing.

There’s a lot to unpick here.
The ending is shocking, sickening, horrific - and made me realise that whilst I thought I was reading something from the horror genre that horror is not just about haunted houses and the supernatural after all.

Model Home follows Ezri, their family, and their childhood home… On one hand, the escalation of suspense and relentless unknowns feel reminiscent of traditional haunted house stories. But in every other way, this book shatters the previously established ‘rules’ of the genre. The eerie occurrences tied to the home become increasingly real, raw, and terrifying as more is revealed, blurring the line between psychological and supernatural horror.

Rivers weaves together themes of intergenerational trauma, rigid gender ‘norms’, racial violence, and the neurodivergent experience in a neurotypical world in a truly mind-blowing way. The depth and complexity of these intersections are so powerful that many connections didn’t fully click for me until the latter part of the book. The way these themes are integrated into the horror elements makes for an unsettling yet deeply resonant reading experience.

I found the atmosphere of Model Home particularly striking. The house itself becomes a character, twisting and shifting right along with the realisations that Rivers slowly reveals to the reader. The writing is immersive and haunting, making even the seemingly more mundane moments fraught with tension.

This is the third book I’ve read by Rivers, and my goodness, I will forever read everything fae write, the storytelling is just that captivating. Rivers has an incredible talent for crafting engaging narratives that pull you in completely, making it feel almost impossible to put the book down. Similarly to Rivers’ previous books, the characters are so incredibly well-developed, with relationships that feel deeply complex, and emotionally charged in ways that mirror real life.

As always, be sure to check the trigger and content warnings before diving in, as Rivers does not shy away from difficult and intense themes.

Thanks to Random House UK and NetGalley for the e-arc. All opinions are my own.

Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Pedophilia, Racism, and Suicidal thoughts. Moderate: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child abuse, Death, Emotional abuse, Sexual content, Suicide, Religious bigotry, and Death of parent. Minor: Bullying, Eating disorder, Transphobia, and Suicide attempt