Harare Review of Books

304 pages. Expected pub. date: October 1, 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fiction.

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I’m embarrassed to admit that this is my first Rivers Solomon book; but I have been aiming to read them for many years. Glad to report that this was an excellent place to start.

Model Home is a spooky, unsettling read; I felt unmoored for most of it, and that’s because readers are guided through the story by a rather unreliable narrator. It’s not their fault, we can tell immediately. They come from a family that looks amazing on the outside: super successful Black parents decide to move from New York to Dallas, Texas, where they buy what was a model home in a gated community. From the start, weird things happen in that house, quite as if it’s haunted; but then, with everything else that’s going on, it’s hard to know what’s true.

And then the parents die.

I could not put this down. The pacing was perfect; the reader doesn’t really get a chance to breathe. I had to know what the real deal was, because why was everything happening, and…so confusing?! This isn’t horror, even though there are ghosts; the surrealness of it fits much more neatly into weird fiction. And all of these characters are wonderfully realised (boy, I really thought that one character would turn out to be the villain twice over).

Beyond that, there’s the emotional heft of Model Home. The main character is non-binary, and they’ve been through a lot as a result of that (think Type A mom who doesn’t get them, in addition to, well, everyone else out there); and then so much more on top of that when they move into that house. And then now, as an adult, they have a child, and Solomon’s exploration of how bewildering that would be if you were only just barely hanging on yourself is wrenching.

Solomon is an exceptional writer. This’ll be one of my favourite reads of 2024; highly recommended!

Many thanks to FSG and to NetGalley for early access.

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