“Eve and I understand, though, that at its heart, a house is no more than what is inside of it, and what protects it, and who’s built it, and who lives in it or has lived in it. We all had our part. Mama had her part. Of course she did.”

What an immense privilege to bear witness to a haunted house story like no other. “Model Home” embodies a vast well of hurt, joy, anguish, and dissonant adaptation. A contemporary artificer of narrative, Solomon traverses the nuances of heartbreak, inter-generational trauma, and the harsher realities of violence and grief with delicate prose and profound storytelling.

I can’t begin to understand the Black and trans experience. I can’t hold how those identity arteries criss and cross within someone. But I know how to simultaneously grieve the loss of your mother and carry the quiet mess of rage against her, alone. What that feels like in your chest, the cracking, white-hot pressure. A haunting is a shape and sometimes that shape fills the absences inside of us, for better or for worse.

To the readers and reviewers that rated this book poorly: I don’t know how else to say that you should be reading outside of your own perspectives to expand your horizons. “This wasn’t for me,” fucking duh.

5/5 “Sweetheart, says Mama to me after helping me up from a fall. You are so perfect. With your weird little blood poems. My darling, my darling! How sweet it is to have made you.”