Melissa Albert’s The Children isn’t just something you read. It’s something you breathe. It whispers at the nape of your neck, tugs at a hangnail. And what a thrill it is to be haunted by something like this.
Albert tells the story of Guinevere Sharpe, a name that I never tired of mentally miming, who we meet in the throes of pre-publication promotion of her ghostwritten memoir, The Ninth City Dreamer.
Why memoir? Guinevere has the ethereal brand of fame reserved only for youth stars, caught in the grip of an entire public believing her childhood belonged to them. Why ghostwritten? Guinevere’s voice was stolen long ago. Because Guinevere Sharpe is not only the daughter of world famous children’s fantasy author, Edith Sharpe, but she is the main character Edith penned into her Ninth City novels: her name, her personhood, memorialized and sold before six-year-old Guinevere even knew it was happening. Her older brother, Ennis, the other hero of the series, was old enough at the time to be furious, but young enough to be powerless against it.
Guinevere, even as an adult, exists as a living, breathing reminder of society’s favorite storybook heroine. And as if the public wasn’t enthralled enough, Real Guinevere and Real Ennis are the sole survivors of their family, of Edith’s stardom and legacy. Because many years ago, their farmhouse went up in flames, swallowing Edith, their father Llewellyn, partygoers, and the last un-published manuscript of the series.
Guinevere has not seen or heard from Ennis since the night of the fire. Whatever happened that night is locked so deeply within her that she can almost convince herself it didn’t matter. She has scoured the Earth for Ennis, but he has always evaded her. Wounded, she carries on, and in a flimsy pursuit of new narration, Guinevere’s memoir is a last-ditch effort to give herself a version of her upbringing more palatable than what she was given.
Her fabrication is almost working. Everything is going according to plan until Ennis, now a divisive famous artist, re-emerges with a new showcase, a mystery installation set five days from now titled: Mother.
In expertly woven dual timelines, and with a thrum of suspense, the next five days of Guinevere’s life leading up to Ennis’ installation mirror the years of her childhood leading up to the night of the fatal fire. To outsiders, Guinevere grew up in a rustic farmhouse in rural Vermont, cozy and candlelit while Edith wrote her books. The reality was much darker: Edith, seeking to fill a void; Llewellyn, wayward and brooding after the end of his acting career; Ennis and Guinevere, plopped into an inherited rural farmhouse in Vermont to leave behind a scandal and regroup.
The farmhouse is the common denominator, where the story begins, lives, and ultimately ends. Where the children, first mesmerized by the playgrounds of wood, the charm of creaking floors and honeybees, grow increasingly scared by something they can’t quite name. Where Edith holes up in a third-floor writing cave, on her way to prodigal authorship at the expense of parenting. Where strange engravings of children’s rhymes don’t seem so childlike after all. Where their once vibrant and folkloric father begins to wither away, citing lingering, repetitive dreams. Where the parties pulse, a rolodex of sycophants filing in, hoping to soak up an ounce of spare creativity lying around in the presence of genius, only to mysteriously disappear. Where booze, drugs, and sexual rendezvous push the safety of a children’s realm farther and farther into the woods, into starvation and want. Where the weighted blanket of fame starts to smother them so tightly that something’s about to burst. All while the fictionalized versions of them got to frolic, got to live, got to dream. Got to be kids.
Guinevere’s respite is her beloved brother, united against their circumstances, and the stories she’s writing with her budding creativity. But the house’s walls are closing in. She watches it take and take: take her father’s energy, her mother’s time and even a finger, typing away with the nine she has left. Each timeline inhabits its own world, the past throbbing with the ache of a child’s unmet needs, and the present picking at that scab with sharp nails. We live the high stakes days as adult Guinevere with the exact childlike emotion and ungraspable hurt of young Guinevere: a girl who knew so much, and yet didn’t know much at all. The feverish depth of childhood trauma and blurred memory is so masterfully depicted that I found myself feeling like it had happened to me.
The crux: Albert will not let you shake the feeling that something else is looming around this house, this family, Ennis’ installations, and The Ninth City. Yes, there are the great mysteries of the novel: how did the house go up in flames? What will Ennis reveal in Mother, and how could he have ghosted Guinevere for all these years? But it is the questions lurking deeper beneath these mysteries that really populate this novel with those whispers, that constant feeling of needing to look over your shoulder, rendered in immaculate prose. Each sentence Albert writes feels like a first sip of your favorite cocktail on an empty stomach; her language has its own carbonation, lingering long after you turn the page.
The answers converge with the meeting of the timelines, the fire and the installation, in a sequence of pages so dazzling I had to take breaks to seep in the complexities. Every puzzle piece clicks into place, the final image something you never could have pictured, yet was there all along if you looked closely enough, cast in a new light.
Albert gives language to the locked places trauma lives within us, the stories we tell ourselves to write it off, and the way life doesn’t quite let us do that. What do we owe each other, our families? What do they owe us? Something was taken from Guinevere, something that should be so autonomic that its lack hurts profoundly more: a mother’s love. The theft is deeper than she could ever know.
How much can we recapture, rewrite? It is through this mesmerizing push and pull that we root for Guin, clawing her way back to the relationship with her sibling and the reclaiming of her jacket-copied, fameridden name.
From an eerie start to an astonishing finish, The Children seeps into every pore. You won’t quite know what’s real: our heroes, or how we remembered them being kinder than they ever actually were, and our perception of the art they make. There is the thrall of a collective Mandela Effect, a different spelling that we swore a word always had, a pedestal we sliced ourselves to build. But you won’t rest until you find out. And the unearthing, for Guin, however painful, is worth it. This novel is for anyone who’s lived their own life on the outside looking in, and what we have to excavate to grab it back. But our Guin, she’s a writer. She never dropped her pen.
FICTION
by Melissa Albert
William Morrow
Published on June 2, 2026
