The Children by Melissa Albert – Review

Published: June 2, 2026

Publisher: William Morrow

Series: N/A

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 416 (Kindle)

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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.

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I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Children, but Melissa Albert’s writing intrigues me and the synopsis really drew me in. Though there are fantastical elements, The Children is far more about Guinevere Sharpe, her strange upbringing and her sudden, forced confrontation with all that she’s been avoiding for the last two decades. It was watching a woman’s life fall apart.

Guinevere Sharpe is famous, but mostly not through her own doing. Her mother, Edith, wrote a world famous children’s book series called Ninth City and the stars of the book were based off of Guinevere and her brother, Ennis. The family lives in a remote farmhouse in Vermont, surrounded by woods, an orchard, and all the imaginative play spaces a kid could imagine. This is all fabulous if your parents aren’t dysfunctional, but their parents are too busy getting drunk or high and working on their own passion projects to bother properly feeding or educating their children. Edith is especially distant, barely coming out of her writing room. Guin has gotten used to making her childhood seem idyllic rather than neglectful, even for her fiance. Her whole life is basically a promotional facade for the Ninth City books and now the ghostwritten memoir about that life she’s actively promoting. 

Despite all her flaws, I was rooting for Guin. I wanted her to succeed! I was also ravenously curious as to how much she was going to fail and in what ways before the success (hopefully) happened, because there was no way she wasn’t going to hit rock bottom first. I was disabused of that notion pretty early on in the story when she totally flops a major interview. She’s unresolved trauma wrapped up in a human-shaped package. More importantly though, I knew there had to be something supernatural going on in this book but I wasn’t sure how it was going to present itself. Was it going to be light horror? Portal fantasy? Something entirely different? The thought of how it was going to manifest kept me turning pages alongside Guin’s rapidly crumbling sense of normalcy. I also couldn’t wait to see how her eventual confrontation with her estranged brother would play out.

This book was just so good and it’s not usually a book that I would expect to like this much. It’s dark, it’s intoxicating, and it shows the illusions people create around their personal lives for the public eye. Everything is rosy, even when in reality it’s a cold house, skinned knees climbing trees, and disengaged parents.The Children really made me want to go back and read Melissa Albert’s other works that I haven’t picked up in the last few years because her writing was excellent here.