The Children

A Novel

De: Melissa Albert

Narrado por: Rebecca Lowman, Saskia Maarleveld, Kristen Sieh, Leslie Aleman, Iggy Costello

A READ WITH JENNA TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK | AN EARPHONES AWARD WINNER

Read by Rebecca Lowman with a multicast featuring Saskia Maarleveld and Kristen Sieh, with original music and creative production, this audio edition will immerse the listener in the novel’s atmospheric world.

“An intoxicating, genre-bending tale that asks artists and writers: What are the costs of greatness and fame?” —Kirkus

The 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, must contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of their family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild 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, simply, 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 fantasy world?

The Children is wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, and the way our most beloved stories grow up with us. It's for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found its pages cast in a darker light, the line separating magic from reality blurring as we discover the books that once comforted us carry shadows of their own.

Loved it!

This kind of dark magical realism is the genre of my heart. The writing is vivid and the language is complex. I love that I had to look up unfamiliar references like Paris syndrome. Even the end was satisfying. If only the author would now release The Ninth City Series irl!

lagged?

It was slow, it took a long time to get to the punch line. It was a whole lot of nothingness to get to any point.

Pretentious

I Disliked how pretentious and wordy the novel was. Much too long and drawn out.

Ok but too slow

It took too long to get a picture of the children’s childhood exoeriences. Too many details about visitors to the farmhouse

This is why we read books.

With the harrowing thirst of a dry drunk I craved a hinterland-esque encounter … and the author delivered. No words. This book is best experienced first hand.

“It was neither a promise nor a lie but some third thing. A pretty notion from a parallel world.”