Family game

Family Game (in the English original: Step by Wicked Step ) by Anne Fine (author of Mrs. Doubtfire ) is a book for young people from 1995 about a group of young people who tell each other about their experiences as children of divorce and find that their experiences are different from others People are shared.

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Five young people spend the night together in a boarding school. In the atmosphere of a storm, in a secret room, they find the report of a man whose family had previously owned the property. After the death of his father and the new marriage of his mother, he had fled from home and thereby not only plunged himself into misery, but also his mother and his sister.

This story encourages the five to tell each other their family stories. As a result, almost all variants of modern family structures and their effects on the individual family members unfold.

Claudia's story

Claudia's parents split up. Her father starts a new relationship with Stella. Even his mother takes the side of Claudia's mother. Finally, her father moves in with Stella so that Claudia sees her regularly when she sleeps with him. Claudia deliberately treats her dismissively, which is also due to her impression of betraying her mother otherwise. When she stayed with him on her father's birthday, she could hear in secret how Stella was introduced to her dad's friends. Claudia notices that they are ignoring and not addressing Stella as they did before. She realizes how unfair this behavior is towards Stella, and she begins to approach Stella.

Colin's story

Colin's mother left his father shortly after giving birth. Colin took her with him. Shortly thereafter, he meets the man Colin calls his dad, even though he's just his stepfather. Colin also develops close relationships with him and loves him, which is mutual. However, because he didn't have the right job and earned enough for both of them, Colin's mother left Colin's dad too. Colin only found out about it when she was already on the highway with him. Even after five years he sees him as his real father and makes plans for his escape from boarding school and the search for him.

Ralph's story

Ralph has a mother and a father, two brothers, two half-brothers, a half-sister, three step-brothers, a step-sister, three step-mothers - the current one is already pregnant again-, a step-father, two step-grandmothers and a step-grandfather. And even if everything does not go perfectly and there is the usual quarrel between people, he gets along very well with everyone, so that the most important thing for him is the organization of this chaos.

Pixie's story

Pixie's father remarried. Lucy moved in with her own daughters Sophie and Hetty. But Pixie's efforts to retreat to her own room during her visits are thwarted when Hetty is given her own room after an argument with Lucy - Pixies. She tries to scare off her roommate, so that it comes to a huge argument with her stepmother, in which all the pent-up anger is expressed and Pixie understands that the others are also suffering from this situation and that she has idealized her birth parents.

Robbo's story

After the separation from Robbo's parents, Robbo and his older sister stayed with their mother, who had their own child with Roy. The sister hates Roy and infects Robbo with her feelings and all sorts of plans to separate the mother and Roy and then bring her back together with her father. But Robbo has scruples because he knows that the same problems that they both have can only be passed on to their stepbrother. Roy actually moves out and back in for a short time, and Robbo realizes what's behind the behavior of the adults.