Review: Model Home, by Rivers Solomon

Rating:

🏡🏡🏡.5

First Response:

I didn't love this one. It wasn't what I was expecting.

One Sentence Summary:

Ezri returns to the gated McMansion community where they grew up-- and must face the ghosts that they've never left behind.

Tell Me More:

I went into this book expecting a haunted house story, but it's really more of a literary novel with some horror elements. The emphasis is less on the haunting, and more on the family dynamics. Ezri and their sisters are called back to their childhood home by a cryptic text ostensibly sent by their mother, only to discover that their mother and father both have died in an apparent murder/suicide. So who sent the texts? Ezri thinks it was the "woman without a face" who haunted her as a child.

As much as I hate the adage "show, don't tell," this book has a problem with telling over showing, specifically when it comes to the siblings' relationship to their mother. It could just be a case of me-the-reader not being able to relate to the situations described in the book (though I don't think that's the case), but we're told again and again that the siblings' mother (whose name I've forgotten) is a hard woman who withholds love and approval. However, I don't think the interactions we're given with her hold up to that. None of the scenes with Momma seemed particularly manipulative. Was she just gushing with affection, no... but we do get to see her support her kids, sometimes rather gruesomely (don't read this book if you can't handle things happening to dogs).

This book did horrify me in a few places; and not just in a simple gross-out way-- though I also felt like the book didn't quite go far enough in conveying the horrors it was trying to. I think this is a side effect of the book's split narrative, where more than half the novel is spent with dealing with conflicts within the family, and the leftovers are spent with the horrors of the outside world. Those horrors are real and affecting when they are described, but they felt unconnected from the main thrust of the novel IMO.

All of this being said, the book was fine enough that I'd be willing to give another of Solomon's books a try. Maybe this one just wasn't the one for me.