October 2025 Book Club: Model Home: A Novel by Rivers Solomon

Our book club meeting is October 22, 2025 (note: it’s the 4th Wednesday instead of the 2nd). We’re discussing Rivers Solomon’s Model Home (286 pgs), a new kind of haunted-house novel. Please check the trigger warnings if you have triggers!

The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.

As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural” death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?

Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.

Acclaim: Long-listed for Audible.com Best of the Year, 2024 and Chicago Public Library Best of the Best, 2024

About the Author: Rivers Solomon is an American author of speculative and literary fiction. Solomon is non-binary and intersex and states that they use fae/faer and they/them pronouns. They describe themself as "a dyke, an anarchist, a she-beast, an exile, a shiv, a wreck, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade." Their literary influences include Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury, Jean Toomer, and Doris Lessing

Social half-hour starts at 6:30 and the book discussion starts around 7:00. We will be inside in the usual room - the tasting room. It's inside, past the bar, up the stairs, left through the door, and past the restrooms. Ask at the bar for directions. Second Line should have a food truck/ vendor out there or you can bring your own.