THE CHILDREN
MELISSA ALBERT
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: An intoxicating, haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.
Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.
In one, she lives in the wooded shadow of her family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of her mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where her magical adventures have made her a household name. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and her older brother are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the lichen-clotted woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.
Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s creative genius?
Wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, The Children whispers to you from the hallway outside your bedroom, lights flickering as you turn the pages of a book that didn't seem so scary a moment ago. It's a story for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found it cast in a darker light, the line separating magic and memory blurring as the gap widens between the authors we imagined and the people they turn out to be.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Does George RR Martin have kids? Maybe one called "Dayana" or something? He's on track to die before agreeing to finish his astoundingly beloved fantasy series, like Edith...and to many of us not-fans it feels as though there's some kinda dark bargain involved in its globe-spanning popularity.
In the age of severely overprivileged fandoms for what is revoltingly, but accurately, called "IP," this story could not cut closer to the bone. There's a certain inevitability in Edith's appalling betrayal of her children, using them as close models for her fantasy characters. "Write what you know" taken to a dark extreme by a parent who gave little but took much. A bargain her children had no say over. It supports them to this good day. In a sense that's fair enough since it took their developmental years out of their own control.
Guin is the kid who bought in, albeit resentfully, to the hype and has become an apologist for Edith and her invasive behavior. Perhaps she's just making hay while the sun shines, perhaps she's getting her own back for the neglect and emotional absence of her self-centered parents...failed actor father, family-supporting writer mother. She's created a hollow kind of fame out of monetizing her childhood marked by the celebrity lifestyle her parents cultivated in place of actually being parents. Guin's project is to keep the spondulix rolling in. Brother Ennis has chosen a more rigorous path, though still cashing in on his beginnings, by becoming An Artist. Fame has followed, but he's chosen to cut Guin out of his life. Throughout this story we're in Guin's PoV so we're only told what she knows about why.
"Guinevere" is a terrible name to hang on a kid. It practically slams the door on an ordinary childhood because the teasing would be brutal. It's really of a piece with Edith's fantasy life-turned-hugely successful fantasy world: Guin's fated to be an unhappy princess who's become a queen in a realm not her own, and not of her choosing. "Nomen est omen" test case number skatey-eight skabillion. It feels as we're reading along as though Author Albert, author of multiple popular children's books, started wondering about how this creation thing works as a force outside your authorial control. It's clear Guin is traumatized. By what? Her parents are the first in line for blame. But she and Ennis are orphans. The fire that consumed their childhood home and killed their not-good parents was not caused by the parents themselves. What did cause it? How does...does...that unsolved mystery explain Edith's massive cultural juggernaut "The Ninth City?" It's eaten their lives, not knowing but knowing too much, not understanding but seeing more than they should. Ennis isn't working with Guin on solving what she sees as a strange mystery. It is as always up to Guin to do the work, shoulder the burden.
Author Albert uses the psychological reality of Guin's parentification to explore women's roles in our capitalist culture. It's also clear that there are...oddnesses...in this family system that clearly come from the psychological stress of bearing all the load on the females, woman and girl, in the system. When one looks at it out of the corner of one's eye there are ununsual things that cause unease in we-the-reader. They're not remarked on or attended to in the narrative. They are there and quite uneasy-making though...the woods, how cliche, have eyes and are watching you.
The fire destroys as fires do. No more parents, no more books to keep the mmoney comingin, no more brother because he buggers off leaving it to Guin to pick up such pieces as she can to make what she—she alone—will from the wreckage. The number of abandonments Guin suffers would warp anyone in her shoes. Her response...to take it all on, put it to the best use she can...is what fuels this novel of reckoning with her ghosts.
Literal ghosts? Probably, at least of a sort. Edith might not have been as inventive as her adoring and demanding fan base thinks.
It's here the missing fifth star is explained. The tinges of horror, of fantastical things not seen just beyond our line of sight, all crystallize in the last approximately ten percent of the story. I saw why, and saw the point, but I'm less interested in the fantastical than in the truly chilling psychological novel that precedes the ending. That is not to criticize the ending as a natural result of the preceding story. It absolutely fits, it's quite clearly signposted early on. It's definitely one of several possible results of the story as told.
Just not the one I would've preferred.
