The Orphan Game; A Novel

New York, N.Y.: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1999. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Paul Ratz de Tagyos (Jacket art), and Star Black (. ix, [1], 326 pages. DJ has slight wear. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads: For David Gilbert, a fellow writer, one who is fortunate enough to know my splendid editor, Meaghan. May nothing in this book disappoint you! Ann Darby 14 August 1999. Includes Acknowledgments, as well as chapters on Slow Burn, Silk Knots, Christmas, Kisses, Cannonball, the News World, and The Art Room. This book tells the story of a young woman's passage from the troubled family she's longing to escape to the "family" she struggles to create when she is forced into an early adulthood. As the war in Vietnam escalates and as brush fires blacken the California foothills, the Harris family shatters and its members are driven to find new ways to live with one another. With an intimacy immediate and true, The Orphan Game portrays the powerful love that not only binds a family but can also break it apart. Set in a quiet Southern Californian town in 1965, a town where the rules of the fifties haven't quite departed and the new mores of the sixties are fast encroaching, this rueful tale is told in the intertwined voices of three women: Maggie, the young woman struggling to define herself; Marian, the mother who must relinquish her; and Mrs. Rumsen, the childless great-aunt who cares for Maggie when her mother can't. Ann Darby is the recipient of a 2004 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, She is the author of the novel The Orphan Game, a Los Angeles Times bestseller. She reviewed regularly for Publishers Weekly and taught The Craft of Fiction for the Cape Cod Writers Conference and served on the fiction/nonfiction panel for the Ohio Arts Council. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: 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 coup--and both his abrasiveness and self-absorption make him a damaging parent. When Maggie's boyfriend enlists in the 101st Airborne and leaves, 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." Her prose is tightly controlled, however, sometimes microscopically observant, sometimes musical. Her attention to every detail of the period is faultless--from 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. Darby's short fiction has won the Bennett Cerf Prize for fiction.