The Orphan Game

Ann Darby is an accomplished writer who captures one's emotions through an engaging style and a powerful story. She writes of a teenage girl's struggle for sense and freedom from a family stretched to its limits. Ann Darby's prose is simply brilliant. She writes with structure and clarity that is rare in this time of speedily written, puffed up fiction. A wonderful novel.

I just deleted the three paragraphs I had written about this book. It seems as if to tell anything about this story is to tell too much. It needs to tell itself -- I guess, that's why it was written. (But it's AMAZING -- READ IT)WARNING: If reading further Customer Comments, don't read the one posted June 1, 1999 -- it gives away an important element.

I love a novel that tells a great story, especially when I find bits of wisdom tucked between the lines. I love finding a new author who can make me FEEL. I'll never forget Maggie. The scene where the kids play Hangman in the car while their parents fight is pure agony jumping off the page. You can smell the smoke from the fire in this book. Also the smoke from Darby's writing that burns up the pages. More. More. More.

One of the best books of this or any other year, Ann Darby's "The Orphan Game" seems destined for some of the literary communities top honors. At once haunting, compelling and ultimately redemptive-"The Orphan Game" seems to find a place in our minds that, once there, it refuses to leave. Ann Darby gives us a much needed dose of hope for the future of literature.

A beautifully written and fully realized portrait of the Harris family in California in the early sixties, a conservative milieu, at the cusp of real social change. I thought the best character was the father: a businessman scheming of wealth, and saddled with debt. He leaps off the page, all his frustration and fury placed in a broad context, amid drought-ridden California hills spouting developments and highways. And then there's Bruce, a boy who puts CLEAN SHEETS on a bed, dreaming of the Army. I loved this book.