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A Novel
by Rivers Solomon
Book Reviewed by: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.
ONE.
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.
I'm Chava in the garden, freshly aware of my nakedness. Can't let Mother see what lowly thing I've become.
* * *
One day soon, I'll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.
Tonight, she can't sleep. She wants me to strap her fourteen-year-old body to my chest with a sling, the way I did when she was a baby. Her need is heavy, like a secret.
"Yoyo?" she calls quietly. "You awake?"
I conjure up a fake snore, but when she turns to leave, I flick on the bedside lamp. At least Mama owned up to her cruelty, would say it straight: I don't want nothing to do with you right now.
"What's up?" I ask Elijah, and she shrugs. "Want some company?" She shrugs again, her hands obscured in the sleeves of her too-big sweatshirt.
My ability to dredge up love from the paltry reserves is one that comes ...
Model Home is openly a horror story built on social and political realities, in which the lurking evil is understood to be racism and the horrors it enables. It is a book generously and unapologetically for the victims, without interest in laboring over the complexity of racists and abusers, but rather in tending the nuanced perspectives of those forced to deal with the blunt damage done to them, those already keenly aware of the layers of humanity employed by others as a device to gain and take advantage of their trust. Some may find the neat lining up of plot incidents a bit hard to swallow, but the story, while it eventually reveals the strings being pulled behind the curtain, is content to create its own reality, which feels deliberately constructed at every turn...continued
Full Review
(851 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Sarah Gailey, author of Just Like Home and Magic for Liars
A profoundly haunting work of true horror from one of the greatest writers working today. Victor LaValle, author of Lone Women and The Changeling
Intense, original, and wonderfully unpredictable―those adjectives describe Rivers Solomon as much as this novel. Model Home is a story of a haunted house and haunted people; profound family secrets lie at the heart of this book as well as, surprisingly, blessedly meaningful touches of love and hope. Rivers Solomon is an astonishingly talented writer.
In Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home, main character Ezri Maxwell reflects on Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun — about a Black family living in Chicago after World War II, the Youngers, who make plans to move to an all-white neighborhood. Ezri's Aunt Jacqueline compares the situation of the Youngers to Ezri's immediate family, Black people who lived in a white gated community in the Dallas suburbs during much of Ezri's youth.
The title A Raisin in the Sun references Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem": "What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" The play's characters include brother and sister Walter and Beneatha, their mother, and Walter's wife Ruth. Walter and Beneatha's father ...
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Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live
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