Josie works happily as a nanny—not because she needs the money, but because her employer, who reminds her of her mother, has adopted her as part of the family—until she meets a seductive, dominant man named Devesh. Josie has always had fantasies about submission, and is swiftly pulled away from her adopted family and into a BDSM relationship with Devesh. But Josie's desire for punishment runs deep, and she begins to suspect that it may be unhealthy—and may stem from events in her past. Abrams attempts to write a novel about the psychology behind one woman's would-be-exaggerated masochist tendencies—but Josie's desires are not particularly extreme, and the psychological aspects are underdeveloped and brought to an unnaturally abrupt end. The book has a beautiful cover—and more importantly a promising concept that gives rise to some to a handful of interesting and erotic scenes. But on the whole, Playing is a failed attempt which lacks true conflict or psychological analysis. Not recommended.

Playing is intended to be a novel in the line of the Marquise de Sade or The Story of O: a novel of sex and psychology which exaggerates the sexual desires of submission and dominances, sadism and masochism, in order to explore what they reveal about human psychology. As such, Abrams begins with a protagonist who has, for as long as she can remember, desired to be punished, bound, and abused, fantasizing about it during "normal" sex acts but also on her own, both aroused and comforted by the thought. When she begins a relationship with Devesh, an eager dominant, Josie is for the first time able to put her fantasies into practice—which raises questions of why she has such desires and how far they extend. Josie believes that her desires are abnormal, and in some ways they are a literal fetish: she must evoke her violent fantasies in order to achieve orgasm. Josie then traces this apparently innate, extreme desire back to childhood trauma.

Some of these concerns—such as the root of submissive or masochistic desires—are quite normal, but reading about them sounds a bit routine, as if Josie's arguments with Devesh are a set of pros and cons picked up off the internet. The rest of Josie's concerns—that her desires are abnormally extreme or unhealthy, that they result from past trauma—amount to very little, despite Abram's attempts to make them major conflicts. The violence which Josie submits to is more than a spanking, but well within the realm of a real-world BDSM relationship. Her fantasies are somewhat more extreme, but hardly unreasonable. All of this could still be a valid problem if her desires had an unhealthy origin, and the book slowly builds up to a repressed and certain traumatic childhood memory. However, immediately after Josie confronts this memory, she comes to terms with her it and all of her problems, with herself and with her sexual desires, disappear. The ending is so short and so simple that Josie's problems, the central conflict of the book, seem like absolutely nothing. If they were as big as Josie believed and they appear to the reader, they could never be dismissed so easily. Abrams's fails in her attempt to analyze psychology within sexuality because she does not explore the long-lasting impact caused by real psychological fetishes.

The rest of the book's strengths and weaknesses are secondary in the face of this fatal flaw. Abram's writing is a bit strange, but still readable—she prefers unusual metaphors (guilt settling like the weight of a cat on her chest, and similar) and dream sequences, and when Josie finally recalls her suppressed memory the narration switches from past to present tense. The oddities quickly go from unique to simply strange, but the text remains readable with a soft, almost lyrical narrative voice. Characterization is simplistic, but the cast of characters fulfill their roles in the plot—Devesh brings Josie's issues of sex and submission to the forefront, and her employer and charges mirror Josie's estranged mother and her (childhood) self. The erotic elements benefit from Abrams's lyrical, almost distracted writing style—they are idealized and yet given an abrupt, harsh edge which makes them both arousing and appropriately violent. The plot has a pensive, slow build towards Josie's revelation, but the end is almost comically brief. In sum, the book is defined by the fact that the conflict falters and dies: the problems are not as severe as they need to be and their resolution is far too swift, and so Josie's concerns appear foolish and small. Abrams tries to write about psychology and sex, about what drives one woman to punish herself, what makes her find such punishment both comforting and arousing. The text, however, is a mere shadow of its intentions: a minor psychological issue, an easily forgotten childhood trauma, a simple and swift resolution all of which make the book disappointing and forgettable. Interested readers would be better to borrow than buy this book, since it holds little reread potential. Personally, I do not recommend it. In its place, I do recommend The Story of O—another book about the psychology of submission that is in much the same vein but manages to be both intensely erotic and intelligently psychological—and similar texts.