Amazon.com Review
"My parents died in a plane crash," one of us would say.
"My parents left me in a doghouse."
"I am the daughter of the Queen of England, and you are the Prince of the Moon." This is the orphan game that Maggie Harris, her brother Jamie, and her sister Alison used to play when their troubled parents left them alone. Now these three must navigate not only their own fractured home life but the convulsive '60s as well. Set in Southern California, Ann Darby's debut novel juxtaposes domestic trauma against the relentlessly sunny backdrop of the suburban American dream--a dream, we soon learn, gone woefully awry. Jim Harris, a developer, is constantly sinking money into schemes that should make him rich but don't; his wife, Marian, barely keeps the family financially afloat working as a seamstress. Maggie, the oldest child, falls in love with her high school sweetheart, who is bound for Vietnam, and becomes pregnant. Before she can break this news, however, a fight erupts--with tragic consequences--and Maggie flees to the home of her mother's eccentric aunt, Mrs. Rumsen. Here she gradually realizes that even after you've blasted your life to smithereens you can still "gather up bits and pieces of the wrecked past and make something fine of them."
Darby tells this story from several different perspectives; though Maggie is the main narrator, we also hear from her mother, Mrs. Rumsen, and occasionally her brother and sister as well. The Orphan Game draws a telling portrait of a family already in crisis, living in a nation on the brink of one. Though Vietnam looms in the background, in this novel, at least, the real battlefield is in the characters' own backyard. --Margaret Prior
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The protagonist of Darby's notable first novel, Maggie Harris, looks back at 1965, the year she was 16, with a hushed nostalgia shadowed by the pain of what then seemed a "ruined" life. Maggie's parents, whose pathologies will make readers ache for the girl, are a formula for disaster. Mother Marian is a seamstress, the daughter of an alcoholic. Father Jim is obsessed with making a real estate coupAand both his abrasiveness and self-absorption make him a damaging parent. When Maggie's boyfriend enlists in the 101st Airborne and leaves (she does not tell him of her fear that she is pregnant), the only comfort she finds at home is in the companionship of her quirky, sensitive 14-year-old brother, Jamie. Soon she seeks refuge with Evelyn Rumsen, an Auntie Mame-type whose house smells of patchouli and whose years of living unmarried with her ballroom dancing partner have made her the black sheep of Jim's strictly religious family. Maggie's pregnancy turns out not to be the true tragedy for the Harrises, and Darby performs a fine philosophical turn grappling with the power of accidents and carelessness set against "the slow drift of small influences." Loose construction diminishes the strength of the narrative: Darby unnecessarily incorporates late switches in narrator and person, and extraneous incidents and characters. Her prose is tightly controlled, however, sometimes microscopically observant, sometimes musical. Her attention to every detail of the period is faultlessAfrom the novelty clams that bloomed in water to the boys who signed up to go to Da Nang with no sense of what awaited them. And the scene when Maggie returns to a drunk, thoughtless father is alone worth the price of the book. Such virtues and bursts of brilliance provide evidence that this accomplished short-story writer can spin memorable fiction at length. Agent, Emma Sweeney. (May) FYI: Darby's short fiction has won the Bennett Cerf Prize for fiction.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
