Play Nice
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY bestseller. 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 novel from the author of Black Sheep and So Thirsty.
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 parents' 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harrison (Such Sharp Teeth) puts a millennial spin on the haunted house genre with this spooky but underbaked tale of sisterhood, self-destruction, and social media. While enjoying a night out, influencer Clio Barnes gets a call informing her that her estranged and deeply troubled mother has died. She reunites with her sisters, Leda and Daphne, to process the news. After making the bold decision to attend their mother's funeral, it becomes clear that death was only the beginning of the trouble to follow. The sisters inherit their childhood home, which their mother always claimed was haunted and used as the basis of her paranormal memoir, Demon of Edgewood Drive: The True Story of a Suburban Haunting. With memories of childhood trauma lurking around every corner, none of the sisters want anything to do with the house, except for Clio, who sees the potential for house-flipping social media content. When she discovers and starts reading a worn copy of her mother's memoir and strange occurrences plague the house, she begins to question what's real, culminating in a confrontation with the many ghosts of her past. The result is certainly a breezy and entertaining supernatural story, but one that offers few surprises. Meanwhile, a shoehorned romance subplot and underdeveloped secondary characters detract from the fun. This isn't Harrison's best.
