A review by nostoat
Model Home by Rivers Solomon

5.0

Model Home is a haunted house book, that, like all haunted house books, is about home first and house second. In fact, for a book about a fucked up house, we spend very little of our time within its walls, even in memory. We spend time instead in the family and community system of it all. The siblings, the parents. The tensions, the griefs. The horrors and the hatred. This book is a searing portrayal of vicious white supremacy. It pulls no punches; it instead tells you not to flinch. The house at 677 is not a good place. Something is rotten and sick there. And everyone knows, when you grew up somewhere rotten and sick, it never really leaves you. Like a bad smell you can't find, that shit hangs around. The pain of generational cycles is so raw on these pages I found myself making sounds as though I'd been punched at times. We try to be better but are we? We don't really ever get to know, we can only guess and hope. It's a fragile, groping in the dark thing, breaking cycles. There are so many layers to this book. The queerness at the heart of it, through Ezri's eyes. The ways gender and Blackness intersected in their family structure. The lines of pain that can be traced down through Ezri and their sisters, the way each bears the suffering a little differently. And at the center of it all, running under it all, the stink of the white supremacy that poisoned the well in the first place.

And of course there is the ending.
I often find "there was nothing supernatural, it was all some person" reveals are fumbled, and undercut the horror built up throughout the book. Absolutely not so here. In never quite outright stating many things, but leaving the reader to fill in the blanks of what the things Laurie, Ezri, and Eve are saying would mean, the horror is heightened many many times over. I felt sick. And what else could have been the answer, really? "It was a game among us. A competition. It was wrong, the lengths we went to. It was like something had a hold on us." Even to the very end, Laurie cannot admit that the only thing driving their actions was racism. Pure and simple hatred for their Black neighbors, and a desire to drive them out of the perfect white neighborhood no matter what it took. Even to the bitter end of spilling her guts, she abdicates responsibility. It's almost impressive.
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