AUDIO

Model Home

Macmillan Audio. Oct. 2024. 8:24 hrs. ISBN 9781250353962. $19.99. HORROR
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Solomon (Sorrowland) offers a haunted-house story in which the true horrors are those inflicted by society and human monsters. Ezri Maxwell grew up with their sisters in an affluent home, the only Black family in a predominantly white neighborhood. The children believed their house is haunted by a malevolent entity Ezri called Nightmare Mother. Upon reaching adulthood, they scatter and only return to their childhood home when Ezri finds their parents dead of apparent suicides, leaving the siblings, particularly Ezri, to confront the nightmare living in their house. The supernatural serves merely as a backdrop as Solomon delivers a stark character study of siblings afflicted with trauma. With an especially nuanced portrait of Ezri, narrator Gabby Beans depicts a family whose members are individually broken. Through Beans’s emotional performance, Ezri is shown to be a pressure cooker, struggling to contain and express the anger and horror inflicted by their life in the house, as well as their experience being Black, neurodivergent, and nonbinary.
VERDICT A troubling story limning the effects of childhood trauma, grooming, and abuse, this is recommended for fans of Tananarive Due, who also writes strong Black characters encountering supernatural and societal horrors.
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