The family vacation provides an ideal opportunity to test those relationships. For writers, the vacation plot is a petri dish filled with parents and children, long-standing and unresolved angst, and a confined space. For readers, we’re transported to a dreamy destination, either one we’re familiar with or wish we were. In Ryan Effgen’s Make Nice, we join the Pickford family for a week-long stay on a fictional version of Mackinac Island in the upper Great Lakes.
Effegen delivers on the drama, but not so much on the family. The novel centers around three siblings, Viv, Peter, and Corey, and explores their relationship with the island in the wake of the death of their mother. Their father, a distant patriarch, has insisted they join him at the island’s grand hotel to honor their late mother’s last wishes. He’s paid for everything, but remains largely absent from the novel. During their adolescence, the family stayed in a house they owned, a simple summer cottage. Then one summer was their last.
Much of the novel is told through flashbacks. These adults are tied to their past through traumas, all stemming from that final season at the house. None of them knew at the time that the house would be sold. Each of them has a reason to feel sentimental about it, and the novel plays out during the week-long vacation as they confront both the past and present.
Viv and her daughter Ash arrive on the island alongside Peter. We immediately feel the exoticism of the island when they are transported by horse-drawn carriages. Cars have been banned. However, the siblings notice changes to this beloved, isolated town. The postcard-perfect Main Street now has a Starbucks, even as it remains as impractical as ever.
Meanwhile, Viv’s husband Warren has stayed behind. After years of their heteronormative lifestyle, he’s finally coming out to himself and his wife. Peter is a scientist and academic. He’s successful enough, in a stable tenured position, and has even discovered a species of snail. Now he’s up for a promotion—one that he even admits wouldn’t actually change his life all that much—but he’s convinced it’s important for him to land. After all, he doesn’t have much else happening outside of his snail research. When they arrive at the hotel, they discover their estranged brother Corey, who couldn’t show up to their mother’s funeral, has decided to join them, unannounced, for the vacation with their father.
The narrative point of view shifts between these three in close third person. Each of their plotlines offers a compelling individual story of trauma, self-discovery, and evolutionary change. Even bad-boy Corey is easy to root for. Becoming invested in Peter’s and Viv’s outcomes is even easier. There does seem an unnatural an abundance of attractive, horny, available, middle-aged people populating the island.
Since we experience the story from the sibling’s perspectives, shifting point of view between each chapter, we end up with insight into each of their experiences of that last summer. Structurally, this point of view is essential for sprawling family dramas so that we as readers can experience many different layers of the interwoven conflicts. Problematically here, the individual narratives never really intersect. They aren’t so much woven together as they are laid out in parallel. Their only commonality is the island, and that last summer in the house.
We also only see glimpses of their father at various moments. He exists as a plot device—to tell them to show up at dinner, pay for the hotel—but with little actual influence over the outcomes of the events. He has been hiding a secret of sorts, but it has little overall impact on his children.
The novel is fun to read and transports readers to this facsimile of Mackinac Island. But there’s no clever interlocking of the storylines. Each seems too isolated, unmuddied by the other siblings’ plot. Their father looms large only in the abstract. We see too little of him to care. He’s simply not intimidating as an off-screen persona.
The fact that each of these stories could exist without the others does not detract from the overall enjoyment of the book. There’s pleasure in watching these characters unravel and lose themselves on the island. The final handful of chapters even dares venture into page-turning action compelling us to finish reading. It’s fun and easy to read. But it would have simply had more impact, and felt more satisfying, if these siblings had more overlapping complexity to them.
If there is one thing to unite them, the siblings all like to live in the gray area of morality. In grappling with her husband’s newly discovered attraction to men, Viv tells him to explore it more. She wants him to be sure, but also finds herself longing for an attractive man on the island and wants to justify pursuing him. Peter too finds himself in a similar morally ambiguous relationship with a married woman. And then there is Corey who spends the entire novel up to no good, both in the past and in the present. Is this shared moral tight rope enough to tie the novel together as a family drama? Are we meant to see their moral turpitude as a reflection of their family, of their father, of their upbringing? Maybe it’s just not that kind of novel.
In Make Nice, Ryan Effgen has given us a solid entry in the family vacation summer read. It’s a well-paced, if uncomplicated story, or rather, three stories, loosely bound by a shared genetic connection. Spending time with these characters is easy. The story is easy to read. And Effgen builds enough suspense to turn pages. Ultimately, whatever its faults, I’m happy to have spent time with the Pickford family, and to have joined them on this whacky Great Lake Island retreat.
FICTION
Make Nice
By Ryann Effgen
Knopf
Published July 14, 2026
