Playing with the Grown-ups Book

For Kitty, growing up at Hay House amongst bluebell woods and doting relations is heaven. But for her mother, the restless Marina, a bohemian beauty who paints and weeps with alacrity, this comfortable domesticity cannot provide the novelty and excitement she craves. Marina is utterly beguiling, but more often than not Kitty can only gaze on her antics with awe and toe-curling trepidation.
When Swami-ji, Marina’s Guru, sees Marina’s future in New York, the family relocates, leaving Kitty exiled in a colorless boarding school. Reprieve comes in the form of the Guru’s summons to the ashram; but then, just as Kitty is approaching enlightenment, she and Marina are off again, leaving for an England that is now fast and unfamiliar. This time no god, man, or martini can staunch Marina’s hunger for a happiness that proves all too elusive. And Kitty, turning fifteen, must choose: whether to play dangerous games with the grown-ups or begin to put herself first.
Playing with the Grown-ups is an enchanting novel about growing up in a loving, utterly chaotic household; it is also hilarious, heartbreaking, and scandalous. The offbeat and often comic adventures of the free-spirited heroines—Marina and Kitty alike—will remind readers of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. With her magnificent talent for storytelling and creating unconventional characters, Sophie Dahl ably carries on the literary legacy of her grandfather, the beloved children’s book author, Roald Dahl.

Kirkus Reviews

A slightly autobiographical first novel from Dahl, granddaughter of Roald, and a one-time fashion model and current contributing editor at Men's Vogue. Childhood has been both unconventional and idyllic for Kitty. She lives at bucolic Hay House with doting grandparents, two vivacious young aunts, a brother, a sister and their beloved nanny. And then there's Marina, her mother and the center of her universe. Marina is a painter and a bon vivant, as mercurial as she is beautiful. When Marina falls under the spell of a guru, she sends Kitty away to boarding school. Later, Marina will uproot Kitty yet again, taking her away from England to America, and, later still, to the swami's ashram. As she struggles to forge an identity for herself, Kitty must contend not only with the inevitable upheavals of adolescence, but also with her mother's increasing instability. Dahl tells Kitty's story in a voice that is both unremittingly cheerful and oddly distant, and her abundant and occasionally well-crafted similes don't quite add up to real literary substance. Every incident here is obscured by the pixie dust of adorable metaphors, and Dahl cannot seem to resist the urge to make everyone too preciously quirky to be true. The eccentric coming-of-age story is hardly a new one, and this particular entry lacks the depth and texture that might have made it compelling. Cloying and weightless. Agent: Ed Victor/Ed Victor Ltd.