I’ve got a big stack of ARC’s I have fallen behind on, so I’m using this series to help me get back on track. You can find the full series and explanation here.

“I haven’t heard from my real mother in months, not since an email she sent last October asking to talk, but Nightmare Mother, Ghost Mother - always there in Mama’s absence - texts me now. Children, the message reads, I mis your screams. Come play.”

Well, this is genuinely one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m sort of speechless…which isn’t great when writing a review, but here we go.

The book I’m chatting about today is Model Home by Rivers Solomon. This came out in October of this year. The ARC was sent to me by MCD X FSG, thank you so much for sending this to me!

This follows three siblings; Ezri, Eve, and Emanuelle who grew up as the only Black household in a gated, wealthy community. They all fled home as soon as they could due to the unexplainable and traumatic things that had happened in their seemingly haunted house. Ezri who took the brunt of these things, refers to the spirit as Nightmare Mother, the woman without a face.

As an adult, Ezri is brought back to their childhood home, along with their own daughter, to find out what has happened to their parents who haven’t been heard from in awhile. Ezri finds the mom and dad dead in the house, what the police are calling a murder-suicide. But soon all the siblings are faced with their traumatic past and hauntings and have to find out what really happened.

“Mother is God and our house, our strange house, is the Garden, big and teeming with things that I’ve been tasked with naming but cannot. There are words for walls and tiles and bannisters but not words for what it means when walls, tiles, and bannisters savour the taste of your collapse.”

Wow, wow, wow, woooooowwwww.

When I finished this book, I genuinely just sort of stared at the wall for about 20 minutes trying to wrap my brain and head around everything that happened. This is such a fantastic, powerful, punch to the face kind of read. And I know I’m not going to do it justice in my review, but please, please, please go read it.

I have read Solomon before, but it was many years ago, and I forgot how incredible their writing is. I finished the first chapter and realized I’d annotated almost every single line. The writing is just superb.

The reveal in this book is that the house is not actually haunted. The family was drugged, tormented, manipulated, and sexually abused for years by their neighbors. I did start to pick up on this about half way through the book, that this most likely wasn’t a haunting, but real abuse that had happened. The way the story is written though, mostly through the eyes of Ezri, it makes you continuously second guess yourself and jump back and forth between; is this a real haunting, was it all Ezri doing it, was it an outside force, was it the mother? And you start to feel crazy. Which is the point. Now imagine how Ezri feels.

The characters in this book are so incredibly thought out and detailed and feel so real. I read this over the period of one night and one morning, and sometimes when I put the book down to go get more coffee, I’d expect to find Emmanuel in the kitchen listening to music and posting on her IG. The family dynamics are so complex and layered, and the generational trauma is really explored.

It’s also a really terrifying book. I mean, obviously. But before you realize this is all the neighbors doing, and you believe it’s a ghost, the imagery that Ezri describes is blood curdling. Nightmare Mother is so freaky, and the way the house is described as this living, breathing body, brings chills.

On the mail-out I got with the book, it describes this book as perfect for fans of This Thing Between Us, Candyman, and The Little Stranger, among others. And I definitely agree with the comparisons. But this is also a completely unique take on the “haunted house” trope that I don’t think can ever be beat. It’s just fucking fantastic.

“I couldn’t save her. I can still save her. We will all save each other. Or maybe we won’t. Maybe there is no saving, only salvaging. Maybe every breath is the triumph, and we must learn to take the win.”

Overall, I highly highly recommend picking up this book. But please do research on trigger warnings before jumping in.