Play Nice by Rachel Harrison
Publication Date: September 9th 2025 by Berkley
Pages: 336
Source: Publisher
Rating: ★★★★
My
Thoughts:
After their parents’ divorce, Clio and her sisters split
time between their mother and father’s house. But after their mother’s erratic behavior
and wild claims of a presence in her home, their father gained sole custody. Clio’s
memories of the time are foggy at best.
Now Clio is an influencer, living a “picture-perfect” life when
the news comes that her mother has died and left the “haunted” house to Clio
and her sisters. Her sisters want nothing to do with the place, but Clio sees
an opportunity. She’s determined to fix up the old house and flip it, documenting
the whole process on social media. However, as she starts the work, she finds a
copy of the book her mother wrote on the haunting. A book she swore to her
father and sisters she’d never read. As she starts to read, flashes of memory come
back to her, and strange things start happening in the house.
Clio was a fun character, with very little filter and I
enjoyed her brutal honesty.
Play Nice was ironically funny and unsettling! It honestly
freaked me out a little, which doesn’t happen often for me with a book. I was hooked
from page one, eager to get to the truth of the past! A great choice for the
spooky season!
4 Stars
Book Description:
A woman must confront the demons of her past when she attempts to fix up her childhood home in this devilishly clever take on the haunted house.
Clio Louise Barnes leads a picture-perfect life as a stylist and influencer, but beneath the glossy veneer she harbors a not-so glamorous secret: she grew up in a haunted house. Well, not haunted. Possessed. After Clio’s parent’s messy divorce, her mother, Alex, moved Clio and her sisters into a house occupied by a demon. Or so Alex claimed. That’s not what Clio’s sisters remember or what the courts determined when they stripped Alex of custody after she went off the deep end. But Alex was insistent; she even wrote a book about her experience in the house.
After Alex’s sudden death, the supposedly possessed house passes to Clio and her sisters. Where her sisters see childhood trauma, Clio sees an opportunity for house flipping content. Only, as the home makeover process begins, Clio discovers there might be some truth to her mother’s claims. As memories resurface and Clio finally reads her mother’s book, the presence in the house becomes more real, and more sinister, revealing ugly truths that threaten to shake Clio’s beautiful life to its very foundation.
Author Bio: Rachel Harrison is the national bestselling author of So Thirsty, Black Sheep, Such Sharp Teeth, Cackle, and The Return, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, as an Audible Original, and in her debut collection, Bad Dolls. She lives in western New York with her husband and their cat/overlord.
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