The Children - by Melissa Albert (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Melissa Albert has done it again with this eerily beautiful adult debut. Twisty and strange in all the best ways, and rendered in Albert's characteristic dreamlike prose, The Children is exactly the grown-up fairytale I've been looking for. I loved Guin and her complicated relationships, as well as the deft interweaving of memories, stories, and reality--and the many places where they blur. Highly recommend." -- Heather Fawcett, New York Times bestselling author of the Emily Wilde Series

"Profound, beguiling, and terrifying, Melissa Albert's first novel for adults is dangerous witchcraft of the highest order--an insidious and masterfully cast spell of a book about the stories we tell ourselves and each other, childhood's end, and the way that the sharp edges of creative lives draw so much blood. The Children is gorgeous and dreadful, I devoured it." -- Mona Awad, bestselling author of Bunny

"Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth, and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a good book. It's a captivating debut." -- The New York Times Book Review (Notable Children's Book) on The Hazel Wood

"An original and imaginative fairy tale: thrilling, fascinating, and poignant in equal measure." -- Entertainment Weekly (Best YA Book of the Year) on The Hazel Wood

"A darkly brilliant story of literary obsession, fairy-tale malignancy, and the measures a mother will take to spare her child." -- The Wall Street Journal (Best Children's Book of the Year) on The Hazel Wood

"A charming, mysterious fable that unpacks what it means to be a story and whether we are all simply the stories we hear and tell." -- Cassandra Clare, author of the Mortal Instruments series on The Night Country

"Lush and deliciously sinister fairytales to be consumed as greedily as Turkish delight or any fairy fruit. I loved these." -- Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble, on Tales from the Hinterland

"Every line reads like an incantation, and the result is a book pulsing with magic, one that holds the reader firmly under its spell." -- V. E. Schwab, author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, on Our Crooked Hearts

"Albert's fast-paced storytelling is both thrilling and accessible." -- School Library Journal (starred review) on Our Crooked Hearts

"Melissa Albert writes the kind of horror that doesn't just make you check under your bed―it makes you check your own reflection in the mirror. A black-veined, spectral howl of a novel, The Bad Ones cements Albert as the contemporary queen of suburban fantasy." -- Ava Reid, author of A Study in Drowning

"Melissa Albert weaves a tight mystery that takes on a different shape each time you turn it over in your hands. It's an eerie ode to girlhood, suburban legends and that one corner of the room you never want to visit in the dark." -- NPR on The Bad Ones