The Orphan Game tells the story of a young woman's passage from the troubled family she's longing to escape to the "family" she struggles to create when she is forced into an early adulthood. As the war in Vietnam escalates and as brush fires blacken the California foothills, the Harris family shatters and its members are driven to find new ways to live with one another.

Set in a quiet Southern California town in 1965, a town where the rules of the fifties haven't quite departed and the new mores of the sixties are fast encroaching, this rueful tale is told in the intertwined voices of three women: Maggie, the young woman struggling to define herself; Marian, the mother who must relinquish her; and Mrs. Rumsen, the childless great-aunt who cares for Maggie when her mother can't.

As each woman tells her tale, it becomes clear that each has, in her own way, played the orphan game - taken the risk to leave home, to claim her life, and, above all, to be loved.