a story you simply won’t see coming. You might think you’ve figured out the pillars of its structure after a few chapters, or come to truly understand its protagonist after walking a few dozen pages with her, but to read this powerful, moving and terrifying novel is to enter into a constant state of change. The story envelops you slowly, like a cocoon, wrapping you in its ever-increasing depth and heart until you emerge, at the end, transformed ... As Vern gradually awakens to the wider world and its wonders and terrors, Solomon charts her journey through prose that is both economical and fiercely emotional. What’s most striking is the way in which Solomon captures Vern’s creeping, often frightening realization that the world is altogether more complex and monstrous than she once thought ... Full of horror, love and incisive observation, Sorrowland is so perfectly plotted that readers won’t be able to predict what’s to come any better than Vern can. It’s a truly powerful piece of storytelling.

Solomon is fearless in faer depiction of queer sexuality and unafraid to let it be selfish, feral ... Nothing about Solomon’s work attempts to be 'acceptable,' or, rather, it explicitly questions what acceptability means, rejects it, and rejects whomever is creating those rules of presentation ... Sorrowland both is and is not a horror story, both is and is not Gothic. There is never a moment of violence or pain that is not psychologically worked-over, never senseless hurt, never without remorse or consideration. It is never simply grotesque, but instead the acts of violence or monstrousness in this novel feel deliberate and revealing. However, I’m not sure I ever felt a sense of dread or hopelessness that typically characterizes Gothic horror fiction. I believed in Vern’s strength and rooted for her.

... an exhilarating journey to the outer limits of science fiction, steeped in the southern gothic tradition and grounded in the physical and social realities of being poor, powerless, black and female in America ... A furious, justified anger drives this novel, drawing on the US history of racial oppression, but it’s also joyful and wildly entertaining.

... an overreliance on atmospherics at the expense of basic building blocks weakens the overall story and themes ... I dove into Sorrowland ready to be enraptured by it ... I understand that Vern would be perceived by terrible people as more grown than she is, but the narrative reads as if it wants you to see her as an adult ... until it's convenient. Reading frequently that seasons or months had passed, I believed she was in her twenties by the end of the story, until I found out otherwise in a moment of crisis. This is a useful shock tactic for those who see Black girls as too grown, but how is it supposed to feel for those readers who, like Vern, are used to receiving this treatment? ... Similar talking around truths lead to an incredibly painful approach to HIV/AIDS ... I'd read a line and wonder if Solomon was telling us a character secret or using a colloquial turn of phrase for a specific story reason. And then fae'd drop the subject for ten or even twenty chapters, and I'd accept I read too deeply — only for it to pop back up later, written as one character revealing the truth to another ... Outside of her immediate family, most of Vern's allies exist as plot points ... Solomon is a skilled writer, with imagery that sticks with me even with all my frustrations. Fae write about Black pain in its rawest form, and we feel Vern's raw, vulnerable state throughout all of Sorrowland. If anything, nearly every issue I had with this book comes from the places where I wanted more — more of Solomon hitting us with the truth, with the highs and lows of Vern's four years on the run. The real tragedy here is how much I ended up wondering about what ended up on the cutting room floor, rather than the blossoming horror on the page.

A stirring sense of the epic animates this striking novel ... This capaciousness is echoed in the sheer range of Sorrowland’s timely preoccupations. It’s about escape, self-acceptance and queer love. It’s about genocide and the exploitation of black bodies, self-delusion and endemic corruption, motherhood and inheritance. Its frame of reference is generous – in some ways, it’s clearly rooted in Afrofuturism, owing plenty to Octavia Butler, but it nods as well to Giovanni’s Room, Robin Hood and folklore from multiple cultures ... Sounds like a lot? It is, and you’ll certainly find extraneous material here, including a motel-room orgy attended by a couple of ghosts. And yet Solomon matches their ambition with a propulsive plot whose intense conviction and sheer vitality make up for any shaky logic where the likes of colonising fungi and resurrections are concerned ... As for memory, ensuring that past wrongs don’t go forgotten isn’t enough for Vern, who, though still a girl by the novel’s end, has taken ownership of the adrenaline, anger and appetite that drive her. Solomon’s audacity lies in imagining at least some of those wrongs not only remembered but put right, and in dreaming up powers potent enough to make it so.

Solomon once again stretches the boundaries of speculative fiction in this distinct and visceral exploration of the trauma of Black and queer bodies in an all-too believable near future.

Solomon’s outstanding third novel revisits the themes of memory and responsibility through two new lenses: horror and contemporary thriller ... This plot is the most accessible of Solomon’s work to date, but they use the deceptively simple story to delve deep into Vern’s struggle to forge her own identity without buckling under the weight of history ... Solomon often packs so much into each image that the result can be overwhelming. They display a maturing control of their craft, employing a breathtaking range of reference that will enable any reader, from horror geek to Derridean academic, to engage with this thrilling tale. This is a tour de force.

A Lambda Award–winning writer explores America’s dark history of brutalizing Black bodies in their latest work of speculative fiction ... There’s a lot going on here—perhaps too much. The novel starts out strong; the portion of the narrative in which Vern and her children are fending for themselves in the wilderness has the feel of folklore, and the idea that she is haunted by the experience of her ancestors is evocative. As Solomon moves further into the realms of science fiction, though, their voice loses much of its force ... The problem isn’t that the notion that Vern is part of a secret experiment conducted on Black people is implausible—Solomon references both the Tuskegee Study and the work of James Marion Sims, a 19th-century gynecologist who practiced new techniques on enslaved women. The problem is that the concept that drives the plot for half the novel is barely developed. With almost no evidence, Vern intuits that she is part of a shocking conspiracy, and, from that point, readers are supposed to take this as a given. Instead of building a compelling case, Solomon wrestles fantastic tropes into shapes that fit the frame they’ve created without effectively supporting it. The fictional universe Solomon constructs here is inadequate to the real-world issues they are exploring.