Mixed feelings for this one, and I feel the book has a rather mixed identity in terms of genre. There are elements of fantasy, literary fiction, family drama, LGBTQ, and even perhaps thriller at times.
I listened to the audiobook of this title, and I was fully engaged for the 2 days it took to finish it. The narrator has a lovely, warm voice as she spoke the wonderful descriptions, and I would definitely listen to more of her work.
The main character Vern is extremely likeable, and I cheered her on throughout, sympathising with the situations she found herself in, and marvelling at the friendships she made.
A really enjoyable book, and I look forward to reading more of Solomon's work.

I've absolutely never read a thing like Sorrowland. It's an ambitious, bizarre, beast of a novel that left me both thoroughly enthralled and thoroughly horrified in turn.

We follow Vern — young, pregnant, and fleeing the abusive cult in which she was raised — as she escapes into the woods to make a new life away from the clutches of Cainland and her husband, the cult’s leader. She’s pursued, haunted, and leads a life of constant survival with her twin babies, whom she names Howling and Feral. As time passes, Vern finds the bizarre lingering effects of her time in Cainland aren’t fading, and even stranger still, she herself seems to be changing in some terrifying and inexplicable way⁣.

Set in contemporary America, Sorrowland paints an unflinching portrait of exactly what brutality the nation is built on and how that legacy of violence carries on today, particularly in its treatment of Black and Indigenous peoples.

Solomon’s writing is gorgeous and the tale at its centre is deeply unsettling. It's a gothic, fantastical, ride packed with social commentary and critique. There's also a wealth of varied representation and exploration of identity in terms of race, sexuality, gender, and disability, all within a very small cast of characters.

The pacing did lull somewhat in parts, there were some side characters that didn't feel fully realised and some smaller ones that seemed as good as forgotten on page (possibly an ARC issue), and the last few chapters felt rather rushed, leaving me with a number of questions in the end, but on the whole this book was brilliant and I'd happily purchase a finished copy to reread, ponder over, and quote the living hell out of.

Thank you to NetGalley and MCD for providing this advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

TW: racism/colonialism, ableism, cults, childbirth, blood, gore, animal cruelty and killing, pedophilia, homophobia/internalized homophobia, death/child death, drowning, self harm, medical trauma, body horror, medical trauma, child abuse, domestic abuse, slurs, mutilation, cannibalism, suicide, rape, AIDS, mention of cancer, drug/alcohol abuse

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the digital copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 4.5 stars

First of all I need to praise this gorgeous cover. I thought it was beautiful the first time I saw it, but now that I have finished the book I like it even more.

This was a unique (and a little odd) book, I don't think I've ever read anything like it. River Solomon's writing is beautiful. The character we meet here are very interesting, specially the protagonist, Vern. It was great to follow her and learn about her life and what she is becoming. Also, it discusses important topics, such as race, sexuality, motherhood and religion.

The plot takes us to some unexpected places, it has great very good twists and it made me not want to put it down. I loved most of the characters, specially Vern, her children and Gogo.

I really enjoyed it, but I don't think everybody will like it. If it sounds interesting to you, give it a try.

Rivers Solomon has become a must read. I’m not sure I can do their work justice with this review. The writing is utter brilliance and oozes darkness, eeriness, and spookiness in the best ways. This story is a journey. Is an experience. Is impactful on the surface, yet also reverberates to deeper levels of meaning. It’s hard to describe the almost visceral reaction to Rivers’ words and rendering of fascinating , layered, complex characters.

There is a lot going on in this book and it is all amazing. Will keep you on the edge of your seat to the very end.

Sorrowland is a novel that exists at the intersection of several subgenres. I'm tempted to categorize it as one of my favorites, "badass moms having shitty adventures." This book has the bildungsroman energy of The Bean Trees, if you replace the sweet women's fiction vibe of Kingsolver with the gritty dystopias of The Road or Parable of the Sower. I'm omitting at least three other literary influences, but this at least gets you in the right neighborhood.

The book opens with Vern, a teenaged parent and fugitive from a Black nationalist enclave called Cainland. Vern leverages her survivalist upbringing to subsist with her children in the woods, then sets off to find allies and decode the lasting effects of Cainland on her body and psyche. There's spooky transhumanism, and queer romance, and the legacy of medical racism, and GHOSTS.

This was a fast-paced read for me; I so appreciate the way that Solomon blends a literary sensibility with genre-forward storytelling. And I really liked Vern, a flawed parent and unwilling hero whose relationship with her two young children is one of the most remarkable elements of this already remarkable book. Howling and Feral are precocious, as children in SFF novels often are, but their relationships with Vern and one another feel true and fully realized; among this book's theses is the proposition that children are people, rather than physical/emotional appendages to adults.

Sorrowland is a novel about Blackness and queerness, and the haunted inheritances of these identities. Here the novel returns to more familiar literary territory, but nevertheless manages to feel fresh and improvisational, particularly when it gives us one of the Most. Remarkable. Sex Scenes. ever committed to paper. The ghosts of Sorrowland feel like a meditation, among other things, on the power of storytelling, the danger and ecstasy of daring to commune with the dead.

The conclusion of this novel didn't exactly have the shape I expected. Part of this is the Problem of Villains, and how as a reader, I can never pin down exactly what I want from villains, a detailed explication of their psychology or a nod to the banality of evil or something else entirely. So I found the book's villain plausible but not entirely satisfying. Additionally, there's a lot of backstory that gets revealed in the last act, making it feel somewhat divorced from the rest of the novel. (At the same time, this feels absolutely right—generally you are minding your own business, struggling to raise your kids and reckon with your traumas, when your past abruptly lands on you like a cartoon anvil and demands a transformation.)

This book is weird as heck, and deeply felt and deeply human. I'm very glad I picked it up.

I received this ARC from MCD Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Boy howdy, this was a weird book. I love An Unkindness of Ghosts, so I jumped at the chance to read this immediately. Vern, 15 and pregnant, flees to the woods from a cultish compound. She gives birth to twins in the woods and spends the first few years of their lives in the woods, they grow up knowing only nature and nothing of civilization. Vern is haunted by night terrors and visions, and hunted by an unidentified "fiend" that torments her and threatens the safety of her children. The longer she is away from "Cainland," the more her body changes and she grows sick. Fearing for her kids if they are left alone in the woods, she seeks civilization. Vern continues to change and new knowledge cracks the veneer surrounding the seeming black utopia she called home before. Things are not as they seem and they are not going to let Vern slip through the cracks.
There were several points in this book that I wondering where exactly it was "going," unsure about what was rising action and what was the main climax of the story. But I guess that's life, we're all just trying to survive from one crisis to another. I ended up enjoying this book quite a lot and despite the strangeness, or perhaps because of it, I was unable to put it down.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this advanced reader copy, which I received in exchange for an honest review.

I don’t even know how to talk about this monster of a book, this brain fungus of a book if you will. So many other reviews say this, but it’s true that this novel feels so ambitious. There’s no way to fit it into any one genre. The plot and the conversations had within it are so abundant and over the top. You can’t help but respect the work Rivers Solomon clearly put into this. That being said, parts of this were bites too big for me to chew.

The concept of Cainland - a black power movement warped into a commune corrupted into a cult, etc. - is just an incredible place to start from with this book. By threading Vern and everything she experiences out of Cainland, Rivers Solomon sets up a way to discuss race, and gender, and trauma that doesn’t ever feel out of place or trite. It’s so central to Vern’s identity and worldview, and it’s so tightly woven with all of the horror and sci-fi elements. I just found that really smart. Going in, I worried these different parts of the book would feel slapped together and overwhelming, but they really needed each other in a way I wasn’t expecting.

There’s also just so much beauty in the honesty of Vern as a character. She’s hard to like, but also it’s hard to not root for her. I loved watching her relationships with others, present or not, unfold. Her relationships with Howling and Feral offer such a unique perspective on motherhood, her relationship with Gogo is deliciously complicated and rich, and I particularly loved reading through her memories and visions of Lucy, her mother, and her brother. There is always so much happening, it’s easy to think you’re going to be completely lost. For the first 20% or so of this book, I really wasn’t sure it was going to be for me. I just thought there was too much I was trying to take in, but sticking with it really starts to pay off the further you go.

However, the last 20% of this really brought me back to that experience I was having in the first bit. The plot started moving so quickly that I kept having to go back and reread sentences because I felt like I was missing something. It became hard to know what was literal and what was metaphorical. I think the way these messages brought up in the book were wrapped up in the end felt sloppy, and ultimately left me a bit unsatisfied. The ending took me out of the story a lot which just bummed me out because I had been really loving so much of it.

The beginning was tough, the ending was messy, but the middle was gold, full of nuance, and tension, easy representation, and heartfelt reflection. I’m so happy to have read something from Rivers Solomon. I’ve only ever heard praise for their work, and I would pick up more from them just for the sheer boldness with which they write. This story didn’t work for me 100%, but that’s okay because I think it offers something you can’t get anywhere else. It’s unlike anything I’ve read before, so for me, it’s okay that it’s a little messy getting there. It succeeds regardless.

Thank you Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and NetGalley for an e-arc!

“The Village” with a dash of “Alien” is what first comes to mind while immersing myself in this wondrous novel.
This book is truly incredible, imaginative and completely unique to anything I’ve had the pleasure of reading. I couldn’t put it down and the ending stayed with me well after the final pages. I would describe it as a gothic, horror, survival mystery, with a side of a government cover up.

Vern is an Albino woman living in a commune referred to as “Cainland”. She flees and gives birth to twins. Her freedom comes at the price of being haunted and hunted day and night. As she is raising her twins in the wild she becomes wracked with body pains and growths on her back. As she fights to survive make a better life for herself and children she meets a brilliant cast of supporting characters that both help and hinder her search for the truth.

This book contains sexual abuse, child abuse, rape, self harm, religious cults, and murder. There are prominate themes of race, sexuality, and is LGBTQ+ friendly.

I was given an advanced copy of this novel through NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

This isn't my normal type of read, but it was so propulsive I could not put it down! Vern is an incredible character that I will never forget. It is great to see marginalized voices brought to this genre.

This book had it all, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing. It encompassed the turmoil of the ‘60’s, including stories of the rise of Black Power and U.S. government betrayal. This was also a story about living under the authority of a cult and a young girl’s escape. It then became an empowering tale of survival in the woods, living completely off the grid. But the second half of the story became a sci fi tale that made Stranger Things. seem tame. Throw in a few graphic sexual situations, frequent horrifying scenes that mixed reality and hallucinations and you have more than you probably bargained for. Although the story ends on a hopeful note, this story is not for the faint of heart.

Rivers Solomon has such a grand and unique writing style and way of telling a story. I really loved reading Solomon's work and I think this is my favorite so far. I love stories centered around cults and religion, though we only saw a smaller glimpse of life in this cult and the more important aspect of the story was the after affects with Vern leaving and breaking away. Really loved this story.

“Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.”
Rivers Solomon puts you into the story with descriptive writing. While their writing is fantastic, I was not invested in the story, until about halfway through.
Vern, a pregnant teenager, runs away from home and finds that the hauntings leave with her. As she fights against the community that doesn’t want to let her go, she also learns more about her community’s history and how America has played a role.
While fighting against those that are after her, she also battles to find her true self and understand the change that she is undergoing.
This book is difficult to discuss without spoilers, but I would highly recommend getting through this read that invokes a yearning to research many topics that impact us all.

📖 Vern and her two children, Howl and Feral, make a life for themselves in the wilderness away from the religious compound on which Vern grew up. Vern struggles to unlearn the lessons of her cultish upbringing while also needing to dig into its history in order to find the answers she needs to move forward. Overall, the story being told is fantastic, but the structure and pacing didn’t quite measure up for me.

👍 Reading this coming off of one of the worst books I’ve ever read containing similar themes--First, Become Ashes--elevated this book a lot for me. What FBA lacked in a grounded world, Sorrowland had in abundance. The biggest flaw of FBA is that you never know if the magic is real and therefore, you never have an understanding as to what the purpose of the cult is--aside from abusing children. Here, the story actually pays off and gives readers the answers we want. Additionally, Vern is a force of a character, and the kind that rarely gets featured. It’s refreshing to see a mother in such a strong role and her transformation as she unlocks parts of her past is worth the journey.

👎 Where Sorrowland didn’t quite stand up for me is the dialogue. This is probably more of a personal tick than the book’s fault, but I just don’t enjoy reading adults trying to write children. And there is a lot of that in here. I get that it’s not an easy task because kids just talk weird. But man, it’s tedious to read. And a lot of the kids’ dialogue is also wrapped up in repeating story beats that we’ve already seen without adding new information, which is another problem I had with this.

📚 Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia & The Seep by Chana Porter. Bonus rec: Read this instead of First Become Ashes.

I’ve been sitting on my review for Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon for almost a week, and I don’t think any amount of sitting with this novel will make my review more coherent. This sci-fantasy novel defies categorization and takes the reader to unexpected, powerful places. I absolutely loved how visceral, intimate, terrifying, and gorgeous both story and prose were. Vern’s character arc, while suffused with trauma both personal intergenerational, explores everything from the horrific and real history of Black pain in the US to the complex and multifaceted nature of motherhood to the radical act of loving while queer.

I’m going to use one of my rare ‘you just need to read this’ recommendations here, because the more I try to explain it, the more inadequate it feels. As with Solomon’s previous works, Sorrowland is a disturbing and upsetting read in many places, but the journey is well worth it. As long as you’re in a place to handle the content warnings, Sorrowland is a novel that will stick with you for quite some time to come.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Sorrowland is an absolutely beautiful novel that tackles many topics (teenage pregnancy, abuse, mental health). It's not a story to rush through but one to savor and read through slowly.

Solomon's debut tells the story of Vern, a teenage cult escapee trying to manage living alone in the woods with her children to maintain their hard-fought freedom.

But Sorrowland is much more than that. Cainland is more than a cult: Vern's homeland is, like many cult origin stories, a compound that started from good intentions. It started to create a safe, self-sustaining community for Black people to support each other. To educate each other. To take control of their lives and their futures. The leader of Cainland spun it into something ugly. Marred. Vern was forced to marry that same leader, and she took a high-risk opportunity to flee Cainland to give her children a life away from him and away from Cainland.

Cainland can't let Vern go, sending a threatening hunter after her and her children. Instead of facing the harsh reality of living alone in the woods with no support—an impossible feat for most of us as it is—she must also thwart her fiend with every move she makes. We grow with Vern and her fiery children while we slowly peel back the layers of Cainland's secrets and discover it left something with her—something weird and powerful and frightening. This surreal twist on a bildungsroman swept me up and pulled me under. I didn't want to come up for air. 

Vern's story develops far behind this nail-biting start (the aforementioned being only the first few pages). I don't want to spoil anything for fellow readers because the discovery was an absolute delight to read. Solomon wove a textured, thoughtful tale with their debut. There is so much to dissect and analyze and just absorb for pure pleasure: growing up, motherhood, chosen family, struggling with your identity and your sexuality, respect for the planet, the messiness of building relationships, otherness, community, searching for truth, learning who to trust—why to trust.

Sorrowland is an autorefractor, but each lens is a different detail, a different critical conversation waiting to emerge from this original story. It holds so many methodical details and such deep nuance while expertly lacking a heavy hand infringing on an intricate story. Simply put, it was a joy.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as well as Netgalley for providing an advanced copy for review.

“They’d done the calculations as small children. Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.”

When I saw that Rivers Solomon, author of The Deep, had a new book coming out, I didn’t ask questions — I just picked it up. And it’s probably best that I didn’t read too much about it beforehand, because a lot of people have put it in the “horror” category, and horror and I don’t mix. Fortunately, though, this is a bit of a genre defier, and I personally wouldn’t call it horror — more like gothic science fiction; somewhat grotesque but not so much that it can’t be stomached. Anyway, I’m really glad that I read it, because wow is it impressive.

It’s hard to summarize Sorrowland without giving too much away, but in short, it’s about a young woman named Vern who flees a cultish compound. In the first chapter, she gives birth to twins in the woods. The book follows her journey over the next few years as she raises her children, does her best to stay free, begins to transform in strange ways, and learns more about the place she came from.

The pace of the novel is sort of slow, but it still really draws you in — you can’t look away. And there’s so much going on here, all of which is radically and excellently done. Primarily, it underscores the historical mistreatment, experimentation, and use of Black bodies by the US government, but there’s also a lot in here about queerness, and both gender and biological sex; about radical self acceptance; about the complicated nature of how community and abuse intersect; about motherhood; about shared history.

This one solidified Rivers Solomon as an auto-read author for me. They are just so good.



Content warnings:
Body horror; Child abuse; Violence; Homophobia/transphobia; Confinement

Solomon won me over with their novella, The Deep, and I was immediately intrigued by the premise of this book: a young, pregnant girl who flees into the woods to escape a cult, but can’t hide forever. I don’t want to say too much in order to avoid spoilers, but in addition to the horror elements, there is more of a spec-fic element than I originally anticipated, as Vern grapples with a number of supernatural changes to her body, born of the cult’s true purpose and activities.

There are numerous content warnings applicable for Sorrowland (including but not limited to: self-harm, child abuse and pedophilic relationships, rape, suicide, animal abuse/death, non-consensual medical procedures, racism and homophobia/transphobia, including against intersex individuals). All of these are handled respectfully and never used solely for shock value, but to highlight the themes of the book and remind readers of the real trauma experienced by many Black and LBGT+ people. Not that I would expect anything else from Solomon as an author. Indeed, Solomon pulls no punches in highlighting the various abuses that these communities have faced throughout history, and their far reaching consequences. It’s harrowing stuff. Readers of Solomon’s other books will also recognise similar themes of collective trauma and memory.

Unfortunately, while I greatly respect the themes of Sorrowland, the actual execution was lacking for me. The book read like a first draft that needed another round or two of editing and refinement before it was released. Apart from some minor plot holes and inconsistencies that I hope were fixed in later editions, several scenes read like play-by-plays of the action without much emotion, and there is quite a lot of info-dumping (including a large section of backstory about another character which appeared right at the climax, throwing off the pacing of the entire denoument of the story in a disconcerting way). I also couldn’t connect with Vern or her children, who never felt like real characters to me. I found it hard to believe that a young girl raised in a cult and two kids raised in the woods with no other human interaction could be as calm, collected and worldly as they were (Vern, in particular, understands a lot of cultural references that don’t make much sense given her upbringing). I did like some of the side characters, particularly Vern’s lover, but I wish we’d seen more of them.

I really respect Solomon’s aims with this book, but I can’t help but feel that their message occasionally got a bit muddled and would have hit home even more forcefully if told via characters the reader could connect with and a more gripping plot. Still, I can’t wait to see what they do next.

"What made someone love lies?" This quote really hit me with everything going on with the US nowadays.

I don't know why I keep requesting books with these kinds of premises while pregnant 😅 but I did love it. The plot gets so intense and I never saw some of the twists coming. I can't say too much because it will definitely spoil things but if you're not in love with it at the beginning, I hope you'll still continue because the pace picks up a lot. Things get super weird and there's some really unique ways of examining the ways US society has treated Black people throughout history. I gave this one 4.5/5 but I always round up. I've read every book by this author and plan to continue doing so. They haven't written a bad book yet.

Tw: child rape and abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, child marriage, animal killings, medical trauma.