Playing With the Grown-ups
by: Sophie Dahl
Published by: Anchor Books
Buy From Amazon.com
Reviewed by Claire Vath
Sophie Dahl’s debut novel opens with the phone ringing. When she hangs up, the grown-up Kitty makes plans to get on a plane to England. Playing with the Grown-ups puts a magical sheen on Kitty Fitzgerald’s otherwise twisted childhood.
When a guru sees Marina’s future as a painter in New York, Kitty’s mother blindly uproots her family. Marina, a classic tragic figure, moves with her younger children, Sam and Violet, across the Atlantic. Kitty is yanked out of her comfortable existence at her grandparents’ country manor, Hay House.
The naively prim girl is stuck in an all-girl’s boarding school. Then, as quickly as she’s put into the institution, she’s again uprooted to join her mother on Park Avenue. Despite the posh digs, instability wreaks havoc on the family. Marina parades a string of men, boys, drug dealers and artists through her apartment, bursting the bubble of childhood innocence for her offspring.
Again, without abandon, the family moves to the ashram to be closer to Marina’s guru, Swamji, but that too is short-lived. So with great aplomb, Marina once again crosses the ocean back to Britain.
The children settle into the London life, but Kitty becomes wrapped up in her mother’s bohemian lifestyle and the angst that goes along with being a teenager. Determined to rebel, she drinks with her mother, snorts cocaine with her mother and lets herself be treated like an object like her mother.
Given Kitty’s past, will she be able to pull herself out of the frenetic lifestyle of men, drugs and addiction, while watching her own mother spiral out of control? What will become of Sam and Violet?
Author Dahl, a model and the granddaughter of literary giant Roald Dahl, navigates through Kitty’s childhood, weaving in ribbons of sweetness through the murky shadows—much like her grandfather.
Having had quite the Bohemian upbringing herself, Dahl’s clarity and attention to detail make it hard to discern what is real and what is fiction.
Armchair Interviews says: Playing With the Grown-ups is moving, solid first novel.
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