Child's Play.(Playing with the Grown-ups)(Book review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker MEGAN O'GRADY

In Playing with the Grown-ups, Sophie Dahl transforms a glamorous and unusual upbringing into a sparkling work of fiction.

S ophie Dahl isn't afraid of the dark. "That was the school of my grandfather: appreciating the darkness in storytelling, the endless battle between good and evil," says the supermodel turned writer (a sobriquet that might provoke cynicism, were it not so well earned), referring to the legendary children's-book author Roald Dahl, whose heroine in The BFG was named for Sophie. "There's a tendency to sugarcoat everything, but actually children want the truth."

It's a sentiment that goes straight to the heart of Dahl's captivating novel, Playing with the Grown-ups (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), a tale that finds magic and shadows alike in a young girl's coming-of-age on both sides of the Atlantic. While not, strictly speaking, Dahl's literary debut (she's also the author of an illustrated novella, The Man with the Dancing Eyes ), this story of a peripatetic childhood populated by a blustery Nordic grandfather, adored stepsiblings, and a beautiful, bohemian mother who lives--and weeps--with alacrity is a true and proper first novel. That is to say, it's rooted in biographical seeds but grown over by lush imaginative sentences that wear their seriousness lightly, in the manner of Nancy Mitford and Esther Freud.

Meeting life's slings and arrows with a sweetly tart word is, of course, something of a family tradition for Dahl. "We were always quite self-deprecating; there was lots of poking fun. With all of the complications, the stepsister and -brothers and ex-stepfathers, there had to be. That's how everyone got on."

Distinguishing herself from her fictional heroine ("I'm less ...