James Nicoll Reviews

Rivers Solomon’s 2024 Model Home is an upcoming (barely — it’s out on October 1) haunted house novel.

Sisters Ezri, Emmanuelle, and Eve Maxwell fled Oak Creek Estates as soon as they could, each finding their own path: Ezri raising their child alone despite considerable challenges, Eve striving to be a flawless paragon of womanhood, and Emmanuelle operating as a social media maven.

Their parents Eudora Washington and Edward Maxwell remained where they were. Ms. Maxwell was too stubborn to leave and Mr. Maxwell too loyal to his wife.

The news calls Eudora Washington and Edward Maxwell’s deaths murder-suicide. Perhaps the true killer is the house at 677 Acacia Drive.

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Rivers Solomon’s 2021 Sorrowland is a standalone contemporary SF novel.

Vern finally escapes the Blessed Acres of Cain, the African-American separatist community in which she was raised. She leaves behind her mother and Reverend Sherman, the husband she did not want. She takes with her her two unborn children. 

The woods into which she flees are a refuge … but a forbidding one.

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The Deep is an upcoming standalone speculative fiction novel by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes. 

Each historian selects their replacement. Yatu is the current wajinru historian. Inconveniently for her people, her task may be killing her. 

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Rivers Solomon’s 2017 An Unkindness of Ghosts is a generation-ship novel. 

The generation ship Matilda set out lifetimes ago to convey a handful of people to a distant promised land¹. It carries within it every flaw known to human society. Until the ship arrives at its destination, there is no escape, not for the ship’s rulers (the Sovereignty) and not for the unfortunates relegated to the lower decks. 

Aster is brilliant. Her intellectual gifts recommend her to the great surgeon Theo — not as a potential surgeon, but as a surgeon’s assistant. That is all she can ever be, because her skin is brown. That marks her as one of the underclass, as someone who can be oppressed and victimized without consequence. 

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