Children, You Are Very Little

New York: Atheneum. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1971. First Edition. Hardcover. [faint shelfwear only to book, a nice clean copy; the jacket is tanned at the spine, with tiny nicks and minor dog-earing at the spine ends]. Novel set largely "inside the nine-year-old head of Lucia Reason . . . a child at once astonishingly precocious and severely vulnerable, who musters all her pluck and whimsy to try to repair the wreckage of her family. With a mother more than half-mad and a father more than half-child emotionally, each lashing out at the other in their unhappiness, Lucia and her brother, Thunder, are dispatched to live with their widowed grandmother in a small Virginia town," where, let's just say, things do not go well. The author (1923-2015), a former actress, was then about a decade into her post-showbiz career as a psychodrama therapist, eductor and writer. Her life was nothing if not eventful: she supposedly got herself out of her first Hollywood contract (with Hal Wallis) by "declaring herself insane" (per Wikipedia); she was a founding member of the Actors Studio in 1947; survived the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956; and introduced then-husband Cary Grant to LSD in the late 1950s (when it was still legal). .