Review: Play Nice

3/5 stars

Play Nice, by Rachel Harrison (2025)

I think I really like books about haunted houses - but I don't mean, like, a house that is haunted by a ghost. I mean like the house is haunted. The house wants things and does things and may hurt you.

Play Nice is horror-lite, with a haunting and, even more so, a very dysfunctional family. Clio is a social media influencer living in NYC. Her two older sisters, Leda and Daphne, are also off living their lives, and they all have a sisters text chat, but they don't communicate all that much. And they definitely don't talk about their childhood living with their mother, Alex, before the partial custody was revoked and they moved to their father's home. Clio was too young to remember much, and every time she asks her sisters or father questions, they paint Alex as a horrible mother and person, who tortured them all while blaming all the bad behavior on demons in the house. She even pens a book, The Demon of Edgewood Drive: The TRUE STORY of a Suburban Haunting - but the sisters promise their father they'll never read it.

When Clio receives news that her mother has died, she returns to her father's home with her sisters. They refuse to attend the funeral, but Clio goes. She mingles with her aunt and all of her mother's supernatural-believing friends, and learns that the "haunted" house has been left to her, Leda & Daphne. The sisters want nothing to do with it, but Clio is curious. She embarks on an adventure to fix up the house for sale, and while she's there, she begins to recover memories from her childhood... memories that contradict what her family has told her all these years about Alex and the house.

I enjoyed this book even though ALL of the characters are totally insufferable. Clio is whiny and egotistical, Leda (eldest) is holier-than-thou, Daphne (middle child) is too much of a people-pleaser to have a real personality, and the dad seems sweet until he lets his true colors show. The only people I'd hang out with in the real world are the dad's new wife, and Clio's love interest. And how those two can stand the rest of them, I don't know!

Anyway, this was a fun romp through a spooky house.

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UP NEXT: The Memory of Animals, by Claire Fuller