Sol and Alice are a queer couple who move into a beautiful gated community. Everything seems fine…for the first day. And then things start to feel a little off. Sol starts to hear voices and see unnatural things. The residents are more than a little strange and seem to be moving almost in sync with each other.

The longer they stay in the community, the more freaked out Sol becomes, while Alice seems to become more entrenched.

The community gets increasingly annoyed with Sol’s nonconformity…and the community always gets what it wants.


This is good, creepy fun. It’s a bit Stepford Wives meets Get Out. There’s a lot of racism, sexism and homophobia here, and it upsets me that people go through stuff like this all the time, even today. I enjoyed the book, but I do think the ending needs some polishing…it wrapped up a bit quickly and just didn’t seem realistic. It might just be me, but I was wanting more explanation. Your mileage may vary. All in all, though, I think Tirado is a talented author and one to watch.

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for the eARC. All opinions are mine.

4 stars

I loved this book. I loved how dark and creepy it was. It’s a bit of a genre bender and it is so wonderfully written.
The only downfall is that there were a lot of characters and some just didn’t really need to be included. It can become hard to remember who is who when there is this many.

ARC for review. To be published September 3, 2024.

Sol Reyes has had a very bad year. First, several workplace incidents at her university lab, the a plagiarism allegation. She’s put on probation at her employer, Yale. Her father is a homophobe and she’s drinking too much. However, her wife, Alice Song, thinks that things will get better if they move into the gated community of Maneless Grove.

Once they move in Sol thinks it’s a little too friendly. The Homeowners Association is very pushy, their contract is incredibly strict and Sol notices a lot of microaggressions from the neighbors. Alice doesn’t seem to notice these things.

Things keep getting stranger and Alice continues to dismiss Sol’s fears. Then Sol finds a journal from a former resident who went missing a few years before and she starts to learn some truths about the neighborhood.

This was not a bad book by any stretch, but I couldn’t help but compare it to Nicola Yoon’s ONE OF OUR KIND which will be out in June, as both deal with Black people moving into sinister housing developments. And while I LOVE that as a setup, here there were some things that didn’t seem to square up with the narrative, and there were so many characters introduce I sometimes forgot who was who when they came up again. So, I liked it, and I kept turning the pages, liked that both people in the couple were non-white and that that fact causes some discord, at times, in the story, but I wanted to like it even more.