A House, a Family, and Feminine Rage: A Review of Play Nice by Rachel Harrison

12 November 2025

A House, a Family, and Feminine Rage: A Review of Play Nice by Rachel Harrison

Rachel Harrison is the 36-year-old New York Times bestselling author of Black Sheep (2023) and So Thirsty (2024). Her most recent novel, Play Nice (2025), was called an “instant hit” by the New York Times. Prior to three weeks ago, I’d never heard of Harrison; but I was seeking literary agents in my genre via QueryTracker and trying to identify comparables to my manuscript, Pharmakon. Harrison’s books, Black Sheep and Play Nice topped that search, so I purchased both to read and compare to my manuscript: are they legitimate comparables? Can I use them in my query letter to agents seeking “feminine rage”? Well…I finished Play Nice last night at about midnight, and here are my thoughts.

Reviews of Play Nice online are mixed. Those who read for pure entertainment have nothing but praise for the book; however, those who read with a writer’s eye tend to have more to say—and based on my background, I fall into that second category.

I loved Harrison’s plot and themes. I am a gothic queen, as my regular readers already know. My literary tastes ripened on all things dark and gory, Stephen King and Anne Rice, and Harrison’s book did not disappoint on this front. While the setting would have pleased my palate better if it had been a little darker, a little more ancient or historical (the haunted house is a split ranch, where a Victorian is depicted on the cover), Harrison doesn’t shy away from gore. One of the scenes, an exorcism that takes place around the kitchen’s glass table, reminded me of the gruesome glass-domed clock in King’s The Shining. Each moment any of the books’ women encounter the demon, I recalled Lasher’s airplane seduction of Rowan Mayfair in Rice’s The Witching Hour. And while one reviewer was right to claim that Harrison’s haunted house and demon were real to the story and did not simply stand in for family trauma, I think Harrison accomplishes both simultaneously: this is a ghost story—a true horror with actual demon possession—and that horror also represents generational family trauma, if that’s what the reader wishes to take from it.

One of my other comparables for my manuscript, Pharmakon, is Wuthering Heights, for its depiction of generational trauma. Harrison’s book serves the reader equally corrupt family dysfunction: a seemingly perfect father who poisons the well for his daughters’ relationships with their mother, his ex-wife, and three sisters vie for the role of golden child. I was impressed by Harrison’s messages throughout the novel about truth. Whose truth? What is truth? Everyone in the family has a different story to tell; everyone has their own truth. Harrison also illustrates the complexity of human nature, especially in the character of the father, who is at once both hero and villain. It would be simple to paint the man one single color: an evil misogynist. But he is not that. He is complex. He did want what was best for his girls. The same can be said of Harrison’s representation of the mother, Alex. Finally, the girls vying for the role of “perfect daughter” is very, very real. Their jealousies run deep, their resentments even deeper. As in Wuthering Heights, it is all dark and ugly and true.

The book was a quick, easy read. The plot turns the pages for you.

All of this said, as a writer, I had difficulty wanting to read this book because of its lazy sentence-level writing (patterned, predictable writing errors) and its snarky, annoying, immature, shallow protagonist. There was a moment, right about when I went back to the internet to see if there were any negative reviews of the book, that I did not want to finish it. Still, I kept on, assuring myself that I’d find lessons through my frustration.

Harrison writes in fragments. Every paragraph contains at least one fragment error. In theory, there is nothing wrong with this. Even I, as a writing instructor, believe that we should break language rules in our writing—intentionally, to a purpose—occasionally. But Harrison makes this error so frequently that I cannot help but wonder if she even realizes she’s doing it. Maybe she doesn’t know how to construct a complete sentence (independent clause)? This lack of awareness of her writing becomes apparent when you see, from one page to the next, the very same sentence structure errors repeated such that they become redundant. She’ll write a full sentence, follow it with a fragment, and then follow that with a single word, and another single word. Here’s an example:

“My first impression of the house was that it was in a nice neighborhood. Perfect for trick-or-treating, for making friends with neighbors. I was struck by the color of the house—an intense red—and how different it was from the other houses in the neighborhood. More angular. Harsher” (67).

There are times I have written paragraphs like this, I’m sure. And on its own, I don’t hate it. What bothers me is that this happens every page, and once I noticed the pattern, every time it reappeared it was like a gong going off in my head: AGAIN! It distracted me from the storyline. I wouldn’t call this “bad” writing, but I would call it “unaware” writing. For me, every single sentence, every single word, matters. Each are scrutinized to determine whether they fulfil the purpose of that language. I am aware of everything I write, every pattern I shape, and I ask that my students become aware of their own, too. Harrison is not.

More evidence that Harrison is unaware of her writing patterns is that both the daughter, Clío, and the mother, Alex, write with this pattern of errors. The excerpt above comes from Alex’s book, Demon of Edgewood Drive: The True Story of a Suburban Haunting. Yet the pattern appears throughout Play Nice, which is Clío’s first-person PoV. This makes me reflect upon Anne Enright’s book, The Wren, The Wren: in this book, we have alternating chapters from the perspective of the mother, Carmel, and her daughter, Nell. Each of those chapters is written as that character from the interior—and the voices are distinct. This is a skill I am attempting to emulate in my manuscript, Pharmakon, between Cat and Bash, and it is a skill that Harrison does not master in Play Nice. Alex and Clío are written in the same voice.

Finally, Clío’s tone chafed. For a 28-year-old, her interactions with her father and sisters are angsty, snarky, and pre-teen-coded. Although I’m not opposed to an unlikeable protagonist, and in fact have written many of my own, I found Clío’s voice far less mature than her age—in such a way that it disrupted my suspension of disbelief.

Because Black Sheep has such great reviews and because I’ve already purchased it, I will read that book next, despite my suspicions that Harrison’s stylistic writing errors will permeate that text too and impact my reading enjoyment.

In the end, while this book was not my favorite for various reasons, it is a legitimate comparable to my own for its haunted house, its focus on generational trauma, and its delightfully flawed protagonist. I’ll be using it in my query letters.