Review: Playing With the Grown-Ups by Sophie Dahl
Playing With the Grown-Ups is a highly entertaining coming-of-age story about a girl from a very well, unusual family. Kitty is the illegitimate daughter of a teenage mother and a much older (and married) man, whose role in her life is to supply the occasional bit of money. She lives with her mother, nanny and her younger brother and sister in a small cottage at the back of the house where her eccentric grandparents and two young aunts live. Family life is chaotic--her grandfather, or Bestepapa is something of an eccentric her mother, Marina, is an artist who suffers bouts of depression and Kitty's aunts both make a fuss of her. That life soon comes crashing down, however, when Marina meets a guru, who soon wields a bit too much influence on her and convinces Marina to move to the United States. From then on, Kitty is flung between boarding schools, countries and each has a more detrimental effect on her than the last, until Kitty eventually comes to realise that Marina isn't ...