Ezri and their two sisters stay far, far away from the "cursed McMansion" where they grew up as the only Black family in a too-white, too-exclusive suburb. But after receiving disturbing text messages from their mother's phone number, Ezri does the "siblingly" thing and returns to the house, where they find their parents dead in the backyard. The now-empty house is steeped in memories of the "invisible tyrannies" they experienced there: bathwater turning to acid; a dirty clump of hair clogging the drain; taking a nap and waking up inside the oven. "The world unfolds according to a logic most strange when you're a child, and it wouldn't do any good to try to parse it. If a house has claws, a house has claws."
These tyrannies, past and present, stretch across Rivers Solomon's haunting Model Home as the siblings face their worst fears to determine what happened to their parents. Each has their own recollections and understanding of what was--and is--true about the house they grew up in and what might be delusion. Writing from Ezri's point of view, Solomon (An Unkindness of Ghosts) succeeds in setting up a narrative that is as convincing as it is unbelievable, creepily unfolding like a cross between a fever dream and an epic story of gaslighting. Chilling and terrifying, Model Home proves to be a wild, eerie novel of family secrets and abiding love, teetering on the edge of the fantastical but contextualized by the very real horrors of a modern world rife with disturbing dynamics of race, gender, class, and trauma. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer