I'll start by saying the Sorrowland is one of my favorite books of all time, and I also really love The Deep (though I know that is not just Solomon's work). And because I'm a fan of horror, Model Home was one of my most anticipated books of the year.

I started the audiobook and had to pause about 20% in because I was desperate to annotate a physical copy of it. The writing is simply sublime. That pause ended up lasting a couple of months, because it took me a while to be in the headspace again to dive into a dark story about the things that haunt us.

Model Home is creepy, unsettling, devastating. It is also somewhat predictable and a bit heavy-handed. My mental health is grateful for that pause I took, but I am not sure if I would have enjoyed this more or less if I had just kept going the first time I picked it up, because I do think that the pause is part of what made it so predictable to me. And because I had a sense of where we might be going, some of the tension dissipated and part of me was simply eager to get to the end.

I can absolutely see why this book doesn't work for a lot of people, and I can also see why many have it as one of their favorites of the year. I seem to have had both of those sides warring within me, so I get it!

It's also hard to recommend this book without spoiling it, which is a bummer. Absolutely seek out content warnings for this one, and I'll go ahead and call out sexual assault of a minor as a big one.

I have sat with my thoughts on this book for a couple of weeks now, and I think time is making me appreciate this more than I did when I first finished. I was probably at a 3 or 3.5 when I finished, but between the writing, the general eeriness, and the way this book is still swirling around in my head, I am firmly at a 4 now. A re-read might bump that up or back down.