by Melissa Albert
It’s a common misconception that children’s books are all full of sunshine, rainbows and cozy things happening to kind people. As Albert points out in her enchantingly sinister adult debut, many books for young people are “crueler, stranger, more haunted by longing and loss” than grown-ups recall. In THE CHILDREN (Morrow, 398 pp., $32), the making of those books is a dark endeavor too.
Guin grew up in a Vermont farmhouse, raised (a term I use generously here) by an actor and a staggeringly successful children’s book author whose fantasy series starred fictionalized versions of Guin and her older brother, Ennis. When Guin was 11, the house burned down, killing her parents and every other adult inside. She and Ennis were the only survivors; he has not spoken to her — or about their family — since.
As an adult, Guin writes a rose-tinted memoir promoting her mother’s legacy. But when Ennis, an artist, seems to break his silence with a new exhibit (“Mother”), Guin is forced to confront long-buried secrets from their past.
“The Children” is billed as a Gothic fantasy; I would call it more of a Gothic thriller, with a frisson of magic, that flits between the siblings’ childhood and the run-up to Ennis’s show. While the chapters in the present start to drag the closer they edge to “Mother,” the scenes from Guin’s past are bewitching, the Farmhouse pulling everyone under its spell as hauntingly as any dwelling Shirley Jackson ever dreamed up. The book will leave you questioning what you would give to create something truly wondrous.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
