Make Nice

by Ryan Effgen

Sandwich meets The Wedding People in this irresistible comedy of manners as three generations of a family—a snail scientist, a soon-to-be divorcée, her teenage daughter, a hapless con man, and their feckless patriarch—descend on a ritzy Lake Michigan vacation island.

When the Pickford siblings arrive at The Grand Hotel—a nostalgic tourist paradise of horse-drawn carriages, muddled cocktails, and white sweaters on the tennis court—they have every intention of spending the long weekend making nice. Pete, the nation’s foremost expert on gastropods (mollusks), is keen to wade around the lake in search of a rare and exciting Carthusian snail. Viv, reeling from the secret revelation that her husband is gay, is determined to put on a brave face for her daughter. And Corey, a charming, handsome grifter, has lucked into five pounds of cocaine he plans to sell to the first dumb rich guy he can find.

But when Pete falls for the alluring mother of a local kid, when Viv’s daughter gets up to teenage trouble, and when Corey finds the wealthy guests less interested in party drugs than golf clubs and waffle cones, the long weekend of family bonding veers into disaster. Why did their father bring them to this cushy island resort in the first place? And why does Corey, the biggest screw-up of them all, seem to be the only one who knows the truth? As secrets spill, old flames are fanned, and an innocent snail is crushed beneath the unrelenting heel of a hiking boot. In a story that is as sneakily wise as it is absurdly funny, Ryan Effgen’s debut shows how sometimes the people who bring out your worst—your family—can also be the ones to bring you out of your shell.

Genres: Fiction, Summer, Contemporary, Family, Family Drama, Audiobook, Humor

336 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2026

Reviews

[Cheryl Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was enjoyable following the dysfunctional Pickford family on their get together to honor their recently deceased mother on the island where their family once owned a small summer home.

I fell in love with some of the family members and for most of the book disdained others.

The author sewed this story together well with tight stitches and no holes showing.  Good job first book out of the gate.

It's difficult to talk about this book without revealing spoilers.

This was an easy and comfy read.

Thank you to the author, his publishing house Knopf and Goodreads for facilitating this Giveaway.

[Meagan (Meagansbookclub) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not necessarily bad in story, characters, or pacing but unfortunately forgettable.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

MAKE NICE
By Ryan Effgen

An Imperfect Family Reunion

2.5 stars rounded up
Three months after the death of their wife and mother, the three adult Pickford siblings are puzzled when their father asks them to reunite on Mackinac Island, Michigan. The family once owned a summer cottage on the island but hasn’t returned since the siblings were children.

Upon arriving at the historic Grand Hotel, each sibling—and their father—brings emotional baggage. Over the course of the week, the story offers glimpses into each sibling’s childhood while following them in the present, revealing family secrets, unresolved tensions, and the complicated dynamics of this imperfect family.

This is a character-driven novel set on historic Mackinac Island. The setting is what initially drew me to the book, as it’s a place I’m very familiar with, having visited and stayed on the island for many years. The descriptions of the Grand Hotel and the surrounding area were vivid and easy to picture. One particular horse-and-carriage scene is a bit far-fetched.

Overall, this was just an okay read that never fully engaged me. Although there were a few touching moments, I struggled to connect with the characters. Their personalities often felt exaggerated and some of the quirky storylines didn’t have the impact I was hoping for.

Ryan Effgen’s writing is easy to read, with a light touch of humor while exploring themes of grief, forgiveness, and family. The pacing was steady, but it occasionally wandered, making it difficult for me to stay engaged.

While Make Nice had its enjoyable moments—especially its nostalgic setting and exploration of family relationships—the characters and humor ultimately fell flat for me. This is Ryan Effgen’s debut novel, and I’ll be interested to see what he writes next. I encourage you to read other reviews, as many readers connected with this story more than I did.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf for the ARC.

[Amber (amberreadsitall) · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Pickford siblings and their father reunite at a nostalgic Lake Michigan resort following their mother's death. Chaos ensues as Pete, a snail scientist, Viv, a floundering mom with her marriage in shambles, and Corey, the wayward little brother confront explosive secrets and their family’s dysfunction. The siblings must figure why their controlling father brought them to the island, and how to finally come together as a family.

Read this story if you enjoy:
*Lots of family drama
*Character driven stories
*Vacation resort setting

I enjoyed Pete’s story line the most. It had lots of depth, and I found myself rooting for him to succeed. Corey’s story line was harder to read, because he is old enough to know better! Isn’t that the case with a lot of family members though? Viv’s story line ended on a hopeful note, but the reader is left to wonder what is going to happen to the family members in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, and Vintage for the advance copy of this ebook in change for my honest review.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Bad Brother, a Grand Hotel, Five Pounds of Cocaine, and One Very Important Snail
Why Ryan Effgen’s “Make Nice” Is More Than a Family Vacation Farce, and Why Its Messiness Is Part of the Point.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | July 22nd, 2026


In cover-born turquoise, teal, peach, cream, and shadow-brown, the Grand Hotel arranges the Pickfords into a beautiful distance, making family disorder look briefly polished enough to pass for peace.

Decorated surfaces are never innocent in “Make Nice.” The Grand Hotel, where Ryan Effgen sends the Pickford family for a long weekend of grief avoidance, is a marvel of supervised charm: horse-drawn carriages, white sweaters, fudge shops, cocktail rituals, a porch with imperial confidence in its own acreage. It launders inconvenience into tradition. No cars, but plenty of carriage manure. No ordinary mess, but abundant floral upholstery. The island promises that if everyone dresses properly, orders politely, and keeps moving from buffet to porch to lake view, a family might become briefly presentable to itself.

Even the premise arrives wearing resort attire. “Make Nice” is funny because the Pickfords are funny, but also because their setting has been engineered to give misbehavior good lighting and correct forks. They gather after the death of Lydia Pickford, the mother who had kept the family’s small repairs mostly invisible. Harold, her widower, has called the children back to the Lake Michigan island of their childhood. Pete, a tender and anxious malacologist, brings a glass-encased snail specimen named for Lydia, a portable offering for his father’s respect. Viv arrives with her daughter Ash while privately reeling from her husband Warren’s disclosure that he is gay. Corey, the charming younger brother absent for years, arrives with five pounds of cocaine and a plan so bad it ought to be served with tiny éclairs.

Much of the pleasure lies in watching that setup refuse to behave. On paper, the ingredients could have made a tidy vacation contraption: bad brother, grand hotel, grievances polished into family history, eccentric animal subplot, one last dinner. Effgen gives the comedy teeth without making cruelty the point. “Make Nice” studies the habit of calling silence good manners until crisis makes the euphemism give way. Niceness here is not dismissed as false. Pete really is gentle. Viv really is trying. Warren is not cruel. Even Corey’s scoundrel charm contains a stranded plea for rescue. But the question keeps returning: what gets preserved when everyone is encouraged to be pleasant instead of honest enough to cost something? Peace, in this family, has often meant one person swallowing the fact that another person is choking.

Even before anyone says the forbidden thing aloud, the narration has already begun quietly undressing them. The close third person shifts weather with each character. Viv notices design, food, sex, clothing, and the invisible arithmetic of motherhood. Pete explains snails, ecological systems, academic politics, and the tiny stakes of small creatures with an earnestness that is both lovely and exhausting. Corey’s chapters move with hustler rhythm, improvisational and self-dramatizing, as if patter were his traveling suit. Ash, the daughter whom the adults underestimate at their peril, sees through people with the cold mercy of someone who has not yet learned to flatter collapse.

The Grand Hotel is less a backdrop than a well-paid accomplice, always ready with a porch, a uniform, or a dessert fork to make discomfort look scheduled. The novel is very good on props that behave like evidence: Pete’s fedora, Corey’s borrowed dinner jacket, the white golf sand imported at absurd expense, the Weird Al cassettes Pete hopes will charm Ash, the rowboat from Viv’s teenage sexual memory, the cocaine bundle whose presence turns caper into threat, the glass snail that carries Pete’s hurt more eloquently than Pete can. These objects refuse to stay decorative. A jacket lets Corey imagine respectability. A room becomes a stage for lies and danger. A snail begins as specimen, joke, plea, then becomes the test of whether anyone has really looked at Pete.

Rarely does Effgen let a joke remain only a joke. The sentences move briskly, usually at conversational speed, then slow just enough for the bruise beneath the line to show. He does not write jeweled prose, a wiser choice than varnish. The language is idiomatic and exact, happiest with an absurdly specific receipt: not merely a fancy hotel, but an etiquette system of porches, dress codes, polished carriages, imported sand, and desserts too small to have committed any crime. The wit is quick rather than cruel. It catches people at their most ridiculous, then refuses to leave them there.

If the Pickfords have a governing mistake, it is not a lack of love. It is the set of assignments love has forced them to keep performing. Pete is the nice one, so no one quite hears his anger until it leaks out sideways. Viv is the competent one, managing humiliation with lipstick, parenting, and a stiff drink. Corey is the disaster, so he can tell the truth and still be dismissed as another kind of mess. Harold is the self-made patriarch, so the old financial story has been polished until it no longer resembles a fact. Ash is “just” the teenager, present for everything and consulted about almost nothing.


Pete’s glass-encased snail sits in too much air, a small formal object asked to carry science, grief, apology, and the hope that someone might finally understand the man who brought it.

Pete is the book’s finest comic-sad creation. A specialist in gastropods, he is the sort of man who brings scientific seriousness to a vacation island and then feels surprised when nobody else understands the spiritual emergency of invasive snails. His career humiliation, involving a prestigious university chair that may go to someone flashier, might have been a small academic subplot. Instead, it becomes the cleanest study of niceness as containment. Pete has been liked all his life. He has been useful, patient, helpful, deferential, endearing. What he has not been, or not been allowed to be, is believed in. Then he crushes the Carthusian snail he has sought so earnestly, and the act is shocking not because it is large, but because it is small and exact: the nice man’s violence, scaled to the creature he can control.

Ash is the one who smells the smoke before the adults admit there is fire. Effgen wisely refuses to make her merely precocious. She is sharp, sullen, funny, unfair, self-protective, and often more accurate than the adults because she has less invested in their preferred descriptions of themselves. Her anger is specific. The adults keep sending her away, lowering their voices, treating her as scenery for their own crises, then acting startled when she has noticed the smoke reaching the drapes. When Corey’s cocaine scheme finally endangers her, the farce stops being consequence-free. The joke has reached the child. It has to answer for itself.


At a hotel threshold washed in cool teal and shadow, Ash stands where adults keep placing her – outside the room, inside the truth, alert to the smoke they have trained themselves not to smell.

Perhaps the trickiest figure is Corey, because men who can turn damage into atmosphere are both irresistible to fiction and dangerous to it. Effgen knows the trap. Corey gets many of the best lines, and he is often the only Pickford impolite enough to say what a room already knows. He is also manipulative, self-pitying, evasive, and responsible for putting Ash in danger. The book does not redeem him, which is one of its wiser decisions. It allows him flashes of tenderness and moral clarity without pretending that insight pays no bill. Corey’s bus ride west at the end is not a baptism. It is closer to a man noticing, with mild horror, that becoming a person may require repetition, work, boredom, and showing up more than once.


A borrowed jacket, a proper place setting, and a dark cropped parcel turn resort etiquette into pressure, letting Corey’s charm appear first as polish and only afterward as danger.

Against Corey’s volatility, Viv’s thread could have seemed quieter, but it provides a pain lucid enough to be ashamed of itself and still hungry enough to want rescue. Warren’s disclosure that he is gay is not treated as triumphant liberation or simple betrayal. Viv’s hurt is messier: sexual humiliation, anger, concern for Warren, maternal calculation, nostalgia for the marriage she thought she had, and terror of what Ash will lose. Her reunion with Robbie, the island boy from her teenage summer, has the shimmer of fantasy and the dull thud of ordinary adulthood. The encounter is exciting, disappointing, necessary, foolish. The past, revisited, does not become more profound merely because it once had better lighting.

Desire keeps borrowing languages it cannot quite speak. Viv’s desire for Robbie cannot say everything she needs said to Warren. Pete’s desire for Rebecca and her son Oliver cannot magically reorganize his life, though it awakens something brave and exposed in him. Corey’s desire for escape disguises itself as entrepreneurial nerve. Harold’s desire to be respected disguises itself as principle. Even the island is a form of desire: a wish that history can be preserved without decay, leisure enjoyed without labor, sweetness consumed without consequence.

In Warren, the novel refuses the cheaper convenience of flattening Viv’s husband into revelation: the gay husband as plot twist, problem, wound, or moral lesson. He remains a father, a partner, a source of pain, a man who has told the truth too late and still must help protect the child who came from the life built before that truth was spoken. When he arrives at the hotel after Ash’s frightening call, the marriage plot is stripped of erotic and psychological abstraction. Whatever else Viv and Warren are now, they are Ash’s parents. Crisis clarifies what romance cannot.

Money gets its own audit, though it arrives wearing family anecdotes and golf-club confidence. Harold’s old self-reliance speech has the tinny ring of a man who has rehearsed his virtue for too long. The revelation that family money, Lydia’s secret support, and Corey’s childhood earnings helped prop up the patriarchal myth does not feel like a twist so much as an invoice finally opened. Effgen is attentive to the stories families tell about who earned, who enabled, who sacrificed, and who kept the receipts out of sight. The leisure joke is not confined to wealthy guests performing absurdity with napkins in their laps. It is also about the way comfort survives by mislabeling dependence as discipline.

Its design is orderly enough to keep the weekend moving and visible enough, near the end, to show its rigging. The book unfolds across Monday through Friday in forty-five short chapters, rotating among its main consciousnesses while checkout approaches like a moral deadline. A vacation is supposed to be a temporary permission slip: leave the mainland, become looser, drink earlier, say less, say more, return unchanged enough to resume your life. Effgen uses that expectation against the Pickfords. The island is a sealed jar, and every attempt to keep a private crisis private begins to fog the glass.

The final third is where the rigging shows. Pete’s assault of Rebecca’s husband, Oliver’s disappearance in a rowboat, Ash’s confrontation with Andrew, Warren’s arrival, Harold’s exposure, Corey’s confession, the police, the cocaine, the old house, the missing family myths – all crowd the same afternoon. Most of these turns are individually earned, and several are very good. Together, they make the machinery visible. The problem is not that the book goes too far, but that it occasionally tries to make every buried truth surface at once, as if the Grand Hotel had scheduled emotional detonation between lunch and dinner service.

Rather than sink the book, the crowding reveals its appetite for collision. “Make Nice” is no austere chamber piece; it likes pileup, cross-purpose, the faintly humiliating spectacle of people discovering themselves in public. Readers who want the gentler beach-family register of “Sandwich” by Catherine Newman may find Effgen more serrated. Readers drawn to the hotel-set emotional rescue of “The Wedding People” by Alison Espach will recognize the appeal of a lavish venue turned holding pen for private collapse, though Effgen’s novel is more familial, more caper-driven, and less invested in one person’s salvation. Its balance – warmer than pure satire, sharper than comfort fiction – is usually held, though not without strain.

One should not inflate the book’s relevance; that would make it less interesting. It is not an environmental novel because Pete cares about snails, not a grand class argument because rich people eat tiny pastries, not a social-issue book because Warren comes out inside a marriage. It is wiser when it refuses the podium. Its touch on the present lies in catching one habit cleanly: the belief that a sufficiently polished surface has already done the ethical work. The hotel’s charm, Harold’s self-made story, Viv’s composure, Pete’s niceness, Corey’s jokes – all are attractive surfaces doing emergency upkeep.


White sand, teal water, and a nearly innocent horizon make privilege look serene enough to be suspicious, holding the island’s beauty just long enough for its absurdity to show.

Precisely because the book is so funny, its tenderness has to pass through the joke first. It does. The best scenes are not the loudest ones, though the louder ones move well. They are the scenes in which the part a character has been performing gives way: Pete hearing that being beloved may not be enough; Viv realizing that sleeping with Robbie has not made her less abandoned; Ash understanding that adults can be both loving and wildly self-involved; Corey admitting that Lydia’s death removed the one person whose concern he trusted; Harold shrinking under the weight of the story he preferred. Here the comedy pays its bill: the plates keep spinning until we notice that several of them are family china.

Of all its images, none matters more than the glass-encased “Planorbella lydiavis,” Pete’s snail named for Lydia. It begins as tribute, proof, plea, and professional trophy. Pete wants Harold to understand it, which is to say he wants Harold to understand him. Harold cannot. Almost no one can. By the final scene, Pete returns to the dock near the old family property intending to throw the specimen into the lake, a gesture of theatrical renunciation that is also, in classic Pete fashion, slightly overprepared. Rebecca stops him not with revelation but attention. She asks if she can have it. That is all, and it is enough.


In the quiet after performance fails, the glass snail waits near the water, and the smallest act of attention becomes the book’s gentlest form of being received.

Under that small question, the title loses its manners. To make nice at the beginning is to behave, to soften the edge, to preserve the outing, to keep the family photograph from showing the crack in the frame. By the end, niceness has been stripped of its prettiest evasions. What remains is not politeness, exactly, and not forgiveness either. It is the rarer grace of receiving what someone else has been carrying without immediately turning it into a lesson, a joke, a debt, or a speech.

Like the family it follows, “Make Nice” is less tidy than its manners. I land at 84/100, which translates under my rubric to 4/5 stars: a book awake in its sentences and its rooms, especially in character and comic texture, while limited by late-book crowding and an occasional excess of convergence. It does not need to be tidier. It only needed, here and there, to trust that one broken family object can carry more than three simultaneous alarms.

On balance, the book succeeds because it knows the difference between repair and being held in view. Repair is what families like to promise at dinner, preferably after drinks, before anyone has to describe the bill. Being held in view is smaller, stranger, and harder to stage. It happens when Ash is finally treated as someone who has seen, when Viv and Warren remember that marriage may fail while parenthood remains, when Corey imagines an ordinary future with something like dread, when Pete’s hurt is not solved but held. The book’s final mercy is not that the Pickfords become better people. It is that some of them learn, briefly, to look more closely.

Still, the island goes on being ridiculous. The porch remains vast. The sand stays white. Somewhere, presumably, someone is eating fudge with the solemn entitlement of a person participating in tradition. That is part of Effgen’s joke and part of his wisdom. Families do not leave such weekends cured; they leave with altered weather, missing illusions, and a few objects that no longer mean what they meant on arrival. In “Make Nice,” the thing worth saving is not the polished family story, but the tiny creature sealed in glass: fragile, named for the dead, absurdly specific, and finally seen by someone who knows enough to ask if she may keep it.















All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Make Nice is being marketed as “Sandwich meets The Wedding People,” and I went in with sky‑high expectations because I loved both of those novels. This isn’t in the same caliber. Instead of the sharp, funny, emotionally precise mix I was expecting, this is a quieter, messier family drama about people stuck in their own patterns, making small, halting attempts at change. There isn’t much in the way of real resolution; the book leaves its characters mid‑stream, determined to keep figuring things out and oddly at peace with the fact that the ride is bumpy rather than transformative. It’s not that funny or sharp the way it’s sold, but I still liked it for what it is: a solid, character‑driven story about family messes and the slow work of learning to live with them. 3.5 stars, worth reading—but don’t go in expecting another Sandwich or The Wedding People.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dysfunction, thy name is Pickford. Or in the words of Robin, “Holy messed up family, Batman!”

The Pickfords are a mess. None of them—not one—is emotionally healthy. When they are summoned to a grand resort on beautiful Mackinac Island to officially end the grieving period one hundred days after their mom’s death, it is guaranteed to be a disaster of epic magnitude. Determining a limit on grief should tell you all you need to know about the control freak patriarch calling the shots. Is it any wonder his offspring are seriously screwed up?

Ryan Effgen has delivered a book with outstanding character development. By showing, not telling, he lets each sibling’s actions, behaviors, and decisions slowly reveal who they are and how they got there. I appreciated each Pickford’s journey, but it was Pete’s story and his unlikely connection with a struggling child that stole my heart. Honestly, an entire book devoted to those two would have been just fine with me.

With comparisons to Sandwich (I didn’t see it) and The Wedding People (maybe if I squint my eyes and look sideways), the bar was set pretty darn high. MAKE NICE didn’t quite reach that level of emotional impact or tight storytelling for me though it did have me wondering where the plot was going.

As with most highly character driven novels, my enjoyment is amplified by analyzing the characters and their actions as part of a buddy read. For this one, I was fortunate to share my thoughts with the most prolific mood reader I know, the very insightful Angie. I certainly forced her to slow her pace so I could catch up, but the resulting conversation was fantastic.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the advance reader copy. All opinions are my own.

[NYCityGirlReads · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite family saga of 2026. I loved that not one sentence is wasted, every moment was purposeful and thoughtful.


I fell in love with all the characters and wanted them to win at every turn.

I can’t say enough - go read this book and fall in love with this messy family.

Bravo to Ryan Effgan - thank you to Aknopf for my gifted copy. All opinions are my own.

[Marne - Reader By the Water · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed Make Nice, particularly its mix of family dysfunction, absurdity, and humor. Of the characters, Pete, the snail scientist, was easily my favorite. I found myself looking forward to his chapters and wishing I could spend more time with him.

I wasn't quite as emotionally invested in the rest of the family as I would have liked. Corey, the hapless drug-dealing brother, was intentionally irritating, but he definitely lived up to that assignment. The other family members didn't make quite as strong an impression on me, although I appreciated the complicated dynamics between them.

Overall, this was an entertaining and often funny debut with an appealingly offbeat premise. I didn't completely fall in love with the characters, but I enjoyed the experience enough that I'd definitely read more from Ryan Effgen.

[Brandon Copley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe I just need a break from familial dramas but I was not that impressed with this one.

The cast of characters was quirky (aren’t they always), the melodrama was flowing like a morning cup of joe but that unique and unputdownable quality was missing for me.

Not a bad read and I would be down to try others from this author but for me, this was not it.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Tammy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars. A dysfunctional family reunion on Mackinac Island with old secrets, sibling drama, and plenty of questionable decisions. Fun in spots, but overall just an okay read for me. 📖🎧

[Ashton Rohrer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Make Nice by Ryan Effgen took me a bit to get into, but I ended up enjoying it. The writing style is easy and natural, and the characters feel funny, relatable, and authentic. There isn’t a clear “point” or big payoff, but that seems intentional and fits the slice-of-life feel. Overall, it’s a solid character-driven read if you enjoy realism over plot-heavy stories.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Make Nice is a great summer family drama set on Mackinac Island in Michigan. The story is engaging, the setting is awesome, and the writing is good. I thought the end was a little weak but overall enjoyed it and would recommend it. It’s comparable to Vacationland by Meg Mitchell Moore and The Irish Goodbye by Heather Aimee O’Neill. 3.5/5 ⭐️ rounded down for Goodreads.

[Leanne Hale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
3.25 stars
The Pickford siblings have been called by their father to gather as a family for the first time since the death of their mother on the island they spent the summers of their youth. Viv is in the process of separating from her husband, Pete is up for a faculty chair at the university where he teaches, and Corey is once again in a mess of his own making. Along for the ride is Ash, Vivian's teenage daughter, who is on to way more than any of them realize.
This was a real mixed bag for me. First, I would say the comps to Sandwich and The Wedding People are two of the worst comps I have ever seen. Don't go into this expecting the vibes of either of those. This is is not nearly as deep or poignant as either of those. What I think Effgen is trying to do here is to in part demonstrate how we tend to default to the roles and identities we took on in childhood when we are with our families of origin- especially with siblings. And if this was his goal, I thought he did a good job of it. I also enjoyed Pete's storyline throughout as he struggles more than the others to break out of that role as he sees where it has failed him. A side plot related to a family he meets on the island was charming.
What didn't work was most everything else, primarily because it felt very surface level. I wanted far more interaction among the siblings and certainly with their father. And no one seems to be "making nice" in the way I think of that term. There isn't much conflict except with Corey, and even when there are things the other siblings should be rightly furious about, they seem fairly chill.
This is a breezy read that would be good to take on vacation, but don't go in looking for complicated family situations or the poignance that is found in the comps given by the publisher.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Viv, Pete & Corey spent their summers on Mackinac Island (though unnamed in the book it’s very obvious where the story takes place) though their family home was abruptly sold after their last 4th of July spent there together. Losing their traditions caused a shift in their family dynamic and now the siblings have returned after their mother’s death, having been summoned to the island by their father. Each brings their own life drama to the table at the Grand Hotel with all three wondering what this family gathering is about. Corey is still the outcast trying to sell a brick of cocaine to the other hotel guests, Viv’s marriage is ending & Pete is scrambling to save his possible promotion while hunting snails. What ensues is a sometimes funny family drama saved by its location. If you’ve been to the island you’ll enjoy the atmosphere and nostalgia. The characters had a lot of potential but didn’t feel fully fleshed out. Overall, it was entertaining enough. ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A slightly unhinged messy family drama that has three grown siblings returning to the place they used to spend their childhood summers. Each of the adults is dealing with personal problems from discovering her husband is gay (Viv) to being lonely (Peter) to trying to sell cocaine (Cory). Teenage, Ash is also along for the ride, as is the Patriarch of the family. Told in alternating POVs, this was just a bit too outlandishly dramatic for me personally but it was good on audio and might appeal to fans of stories like The shampoo effect or Down with the Shipmans.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

This overall just felt inauthentic. A lot of virtue signaling throughout that felt like the purpose was more to show that a character was uptight. A biologist constantly thinks of things like fireworks by their compounds or elements involved. There wasn’t enough interesting story around it to make it forgivable.

[Alexis Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

So promising from Elin’s review. But sadly disappointing. I wanted to bang my head in parts. Others were great: just overall EH.

[Lindsay K. J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️💫

A family reunion on a lake in Michigan has the Pickford siblings each dealing and confronting some diet of existential crisis, while trying to make a good week for their dad and the memory of their mom.

I thought the premise was good, but I never really connected with the characters.

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[Charlene Roberson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced digital copy of this book.

Twenty years ago, the Pickfords used to have a small cottage on this island out in the middle of Lake Michigan. They spent summers there growing up, but suddenly, one Fourth of July, their parents, without any warning or explanation, abandoned the island and sold their little house. Now the three siblings are now grown and their mother has recently died. But before she died, she arranged for a family visit back to this island for them all. Their widowed father is still lost without his wife and is not close with any of his children. Nor are they close to each other. In fact, the oldest son didn't even attend his mother's funeral, so no one knows if he will actually show up now.

All three grown children are going through something: the oldest son, Corey, has never really settled down to anything, since he had a brief career as a child acting in television commercials. The middle child, daughter Viv, is reeling after finding out a hidden secret of her husband's and is not sure if the marriage is going to survive. The youngest, Pete, is a successful scientist without social skills and little ambition, except to explore the lake for a rare snail he is sure is there.

But the island has memories for them all, and as they explore it, they find that, although the businesses still look the same, the island is not the idyllic place they remember.

The book is somewhat unorganized, as it jumps from one character to the next, and it is not as entertaining as I had hoped. Most of the outcomes are predictable and nothing new.

[Tyler Atwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid read. Doesn’t reinvent the family drama or anything but I think it knows exactly what kind of book it wants to be: an entertaining, big-hearted story about a trio of flawed siblings navigating middle age—and each other—after the sudden death of their mother. All while on vacation together on a posh island in Lake Michigan.

There’s humor, melodrama, plenty of family dysfunction, and enough dramatic irony to give parts of it an almost sitcom-ish quality that I really enjoyed. It’s lighthearted without being weightless, heartfelt without getting too earnest, and has enough forward momentum to make it a very enjoyable diversion. I read it in a day.

The book really got me thinking about how the identity you’re given as a child can become an identity you feel compelled to maintain your entire life—or even a trap you can’t escape. For example, Pete is the nice guy. He’s learned that being agreeable, successful, dependable, and easy to love is part of his role. His people-pleasing isn’t just a personality trait; it’s a performance that has presumably been rewarded his entire life. So when he’s an adult, successful enough on paper and apparently happy, there’s this question of whether he’s actually living his own life or continuing to be the person everyone decided he was supposed to be. And the same goes for Corey, the screwup, the problem child (even if his mother sees in him what the rest of the family perhaps doesn’t). I found something poignant and painfully relatable in the idea that we can spend adulthood trying to live up to, or escape from, versions of ourselves that were decided for us as children.

[The Calm Chapter Mandi Wiencek · Rating 4 out of 5]

☀️ Make Nice ☀️
(( Spoiler- ARC Review ))

Title- Make Nice
Author- Ryan Effgen
Genre- Family Life Fiction
Series- Standalone

Trope City-
☀️ Family Drama
☀️ Secrets and Lies
☀️ Slow Burn
☀️ Sibling Drama
☀️ Summer Vibes

I loved the timing of receiving this arc! I got it as I was packing for my family vacation back to my tiny beach hometown! It was so perfect and hit so many nostalgic notes. The way these siblings feel as they drive back in to town, the mailboxes and quirky houses, the small town markets and stores. The scene is so strongly presented. You, as the reader, feel like you’re on this trip with the 3 siblings. Their mother wanted them to come together in Mackinac Island as a last wish. After their mother’s passing, their father pushed them to follow through and make the trip. In doing so, Viv (FMC), Pete and Core (MMCs) have to face each other and who they all represent in their family and individually in adulthood. The story makes you sit back and question whether people are capable of escaping the reputation they’ve earned through adolescence. And maybe the big question is, do people really change? I enjoyed this journey so much.

Thank you for my gifted copy Ryan Effgen, Knopf Publishing Group and Penguin Randomhouse. 😘

[Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay wow I really enjoyed this. For personal reasons (lol) I don’t always enjoy family dramas but this was so good.

A family of three adult siblings and their father return to their vacation spot on Mackinac island after their mother’s unexpected death. There’s typical sibling rivalry but there’s also a lot more juicy drama going on behind the scenes.

I loved that each character had depth and had their own story. Some parts were moving, some were funny, and some had me really on the edge of my seat. Pacing was great, really not a dull moment! I also really liked the setting, it was perfect to read this in the summer.

Thank you Knopf for the gifted copy!

[Anna Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is based on Mackinac Island (though he never calls it that), and I started it right after our annual trip there, so that was kinda fun. I was actually really enjoying the messy family dynamic of 2 brothers, a sister and her daughter, their father and a smattering of additional characters until it felt like it abruptly ended. I felt the author transitioned between the story lines nicely though.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a surprising 4 star for me, as it started out as a 3 - just fine, but not blowing me away. But then I found myself wanting to get back to it as snippets of the past were revealed and the family drama really began to unfold and missing pieces of a puzzle started to reveal themselves. This was compared to the book, Sandwich, which I’d agree with. I think it would also appeal to fans of Stephen Rowley.

[Julia Shelburne · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this messy family drama, siblings return to Mackinac Island for a long weekend. I found it entertaining overall, but was disappointed at the lack of character development and resolution. Still, I enjoyed the setting and look forward to visiting The Grand Hotel someday.

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for the advanced copy. All opinions are my own.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this in a day, just a lunch break and an evening. I like that kind of book sometimes! The one review that compared it to Sandwich was apt! I loved all the POVs of the characters and the interwoven stories. It was a little slow at the beginning but then really picked up. Really really liked it!

[Jana · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

I love family drama and I loved that it was set on Mackinaw Island (why have I never had root beer rock candy?), but not a whole lot really happened and the ending was unsatisfying. What happens to everyone once they go home?

[Kailey (kmc_reads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Idk why the GR reviews are only 3.68 at the time of my review, I loved this. If you like messy characters and dysfunctional families definitely read this. 4.25-4.5 stars

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75. There ended up being more plot than I expected, and I got very attached to the characters. Not going to be for everyone.