Model Home by Rivers Solomon Book Review
Model Home by Rivers Solomon book review.
⭐ 2 stars
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Model Home by Rivers Solomon is a book about navigating trauma that begins in early childhood. It is much less a story of a haunted house than it is a story about identity.
It is definitely an interesting take, and unique from a lot of other haunted novels; however… does it work? Spoiler: I didn’t love it.
This post is all about my very honest Model Home by Rivers Solomon book review.
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What is Model Home by Rivers Solomon about?
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The novel centres on three siblings: Ezri, Eve and Emmanuel. Ezri’s voice navigates the text in a confused, hurt and frightened attempt to understand their trauma through the vehicle of their childhood home, which is the haunted premise of the story.
When the siblings find out their parents have been found dead, they immediately assume it is the house that killed them. But as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that their mental states have become, and have been for a long time, fractured.
Together, they confront the reasons they left and the reality of their childhood home they have labelled as ‘haunted’.
This is a story about identity, but it is also a story about what the brain does in order to survive.
Should I read Model Home by Rivers Solomon?
This book has received 3.68 stars on Goodreads, and a multitude of varied reviews. This review is solely my opinion.
I love a haunted house novel and hence I was so excited to read this story. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.
This story was not only not a haunted house novel, which I had been expecting, but it also felt like trauma dumping from start to finish. It navigated gender identity, trauma, diabetes, animal cruelty, autism, disfigurement and racism all in a single 282 pages. It felt cramped and forced, yet at the same time not explored deeply in a meaningful way.
I found the character’s unlikable and struggled to connect with the story as a whole. Hardly any of it was set in the ‘house’ per se; yet, it was the bits that were set in the house that I found effective, fast paced and suspenseful- which is what I and picked the novel up hoping for.
Ultimately the story is far more about a dysfunctional family than it is a haunted novel.
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Model Home by Rivers Solomon thoughts
It seemed at the beginning Solomon was going to focus on a motif of food, which is something I find super interesting in gothic novels- or really just novels in general. I like the idea of consumption as a metaphor for losing control. However, that pretty much ended where it started. It seems that Solomon simply forgot that is what they had set themselves up so well to do.
On page 30 Solomon writes ‘I am sickened by my desire to eat: a vestige of [their mother’s] constant dieting, alive within me’.
And then on page 46 it is written that Emmanuel ‘had told the tennis coach that our neighbourhood was a demon and that our house was its belly. It’s digesting us’.
Both of these moments felt like they were building towards something greater, yet the theme of food and consumption is largely abandoned as the novel progresses.
Further, the amount of time spent within the ‘haunted’ house was limited. Because of this, I feel that the trauma they experienced would have been better presented as a different metaphor completely- if there was hardly any interest in actually being inside the place of haunting. Especially as ghosts and haunted houses are typically inseperable, so it’s hard to explore one without the other.
Model Home book review
Although I felt this book wasn’t explored well, or properly at all. It did have entertainment value, particularly in the last 50ish pages where I really was immersed in the ‘haunted world’. Because of this the book gets 2 stars.
⭐ 2 stars
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This post is all about my Model Home by Rivers Solomon book review.
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