Playing With the Grown-Ups

March 31, 2008
The full-length debut by the granddaughter of Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal centers on a dreamy, romantic English woman who hasn\x92t quite escaped the thrall of her fabulous mother, Marina. When Kitty, now married, pregnant, and living cozily in New York City with her financier husband, receives the call that her mother has been hospitalized after a breakdown, Kitty flashes back to her magical youth, revolving around her Swedish grandparents\x92 Never-Neverland of a country home, Hay House, shared by her mother and aunts. When Marina\x92s guru insists Marina move to New York City to pursue her painting, Kitty eventually joins her on Park Avenue, and her mixed-up adolescence begins. Wearing her mother\x92s clothes, flirting with her handsome boyfriends and swept into parties where her mother chops the cocaine, Kitty comes through a number of charming yet troubling moments, as well as foreshadowings of Marina\x92s future breakdown. There\x92s plenty of texture to Kitty\x92s remembrances, but the result reads more like a fictional memoir than fully plotted novel.