Play Nice

Author: Rachel Harrison

Date Published: September 9^th 2025

Pages: 336

🧵 Synopsis

Twenty something, social media influencer Clio’s picture-perfect life is interrupted when her estranged mum unexpectedly dies. Leaving Clio, her two sisters and her doting dad to deal with the aftermath.

Clio and her siblings are left their childhood home they shared with their mother part time due to their parents’ divorce. The siblings want nothing to do with it, neither does their dad as Clio’s mum has been written off as a crazy lady that chose alcohol over her responsibilities. Clio as the youngest and with less memories of the past returns to the supposedly haunted house to flip it and sell. Confronting demons on many fronts. Is this a demonic tale or are the family the real life monsters?

🧠 My Thoughts

Where to start! After finding Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison incredibly entertaining, original and fresh, and devouring the cozy vibes of Cackle; briefly entering my witchy era due to this hug of a book, I had high hopes for Play Nice. Pre Play Nice I had a really bad time with So Thirsty by the same author, which I was hoping to be a blip in my Rachel Harrison reading journey. Sadly, this was not to be.

I’m not sure what happened. I couldn’t bring myself to care about Clio or any of her narcissistic family members. The book seems to go round in endless circles. Told from Clio in present day and her mum’s past perspective, through a book Clio’s mum had published recounting her supposed haunting experience at the house, I found myself drifting off during the book parts.

The book gestures toward feminism and female rage, but for me this was undermined by how one dimensionally the male characters are written, they exist largely as props rather than people. Clio seems to mock all the males in her life. She uses her dad and mocks her conquests. I get that it’s hinting at female rage, gaslighting women and how hysterical women are treated in society, “she must be crazy” but the characters are so unlikeable I just didn’t care. The Yellow Wallpaper and The Taming of The Shrew, for example, do it much better. The female characters are given a strong voice, and we can empathise with their plight. Clio is written so vacuously, and we don’t know enough about the mum to empathise with the feminist vibes.

This book didn’t know if it wanted to be a horror in the sense of the supernatural or the focus on a very dysfunctional family. The two aspects didn’t mix well for me.

I am rating Play Nice 2 stars. Aspects I can rate positively are some of the scares were well written and provided some tense atmosphere. I also found Clio’s mum as a character partly intriguing and would have like to have known more about her.

After writing my review I have done what I always do, check other people’s reviews and one of the key takeaways I seem to be missing is that the book is somewhat apparently funny to some, readers enjoyed that aspect the most. The humour passed me by entirely. I found some of the parental narcissism very triggering due to my own experiences and didn’t even realise that these interactions were meant to be humorous. This is the beauty of reading and storytelling, and the subjectivity of it I suppose.

⭐⭐