4.25 stars

Thank you to Farrar, Straus, & Giroux + NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

“Mother forgot her own advice. She’d told me that white supremacy operates under a logic in which everything whiteness does can be rationalized as good, and everything Blackness does can be rationalized as preternaturally evil.”

“Against the house, I am nothing. I drag the flat palm of my hand along the doorframe. The rigid bumps of texture give the impression of bone. The glassy silk—slightly sticky with age—of the finish reminds me of veneer. I put my hand on the knob. Cool. A tiny skull.”

“The only easy intimacy I’ve ever had in this life is with my sisters. Only when I’m touching them can I convince myself my hands are not blades.”

The Maxwell Washingtons, a Black family from Brooklyn, move into a large home in Texas, surrounded on all sides by white, rich neighbors in their HOA neighborhood. They are an unwelcome addition and the neighbors make it known continuously. All 3 siblings, Ezri, Eve, and Emanuelle, have been estranged for sometime from their parents due to being traumatized from their home and their childhoods before finding their parents dead in the backyard.

Ezri is nonbinary, autistic Black person with diabetes and there are moments of inner dialogue where Ezri discusses all of these aspects about themselves. Elijah is also autistic + diabetic, and both of them actively check and monitor their insulin throughout the book. I really appreciated seeing this amount of representation in a book. There are also plenty of moments where Ezri’s sisters correct others of Ezri’s pronouns and calling them a siblings instead of sister/brother. I also loved moments where other family members where aware of insulin levels dropping and helping to take care of Ezri in those moments. 

This story was so brilliantly haunting, strange, and engrossing. Through the prose and plot, I was trying to figure out how the story would end up until they entered the house for the last time. 

There is such a blunt obviousness to what occurred at 677, but Solomon continues to keep the reader guessing due to Ezri being somewhat of an unreliable narrator—not trusting their own mind and thoughts to be true. Solomon does an incredible job of using every single word on every single page to consume you into feeling just as suffocated, terrified, and confused as Ezri feels. There are constant themes of racism, white supremacy, and intergenerational trauma at play and their affects on the entire family. 

Finding out the truth was like slowly unraveling everything Ezri knew to be true, to keep them sane enough to stay alive and take care of themselves and Elijah, their daughter. I am now appreciating the ending a bit more as I am reflecting on it. I won’t say spoilers. But the way that it ends, in a way, is full circle moment from how their parents handled the realization of their past and how Ezri is choosing to continue on in a very similar situation.

This book deals with some heavy topics, and it should be read with care. 

CW: racism, homophobia, transphobia, pedophilia, sexual content, death/death of a parent, mental illness, grooming, sexual abuse, violence