Children’s Review by Melissa Albert – a fascinating tale of technological horror | Fiction

Children writers are sometimes cruel, and often corrupt. And, as AS Byatt made clear in his 2009 book The Children’s Book: “Writing children’s books is not good for the author’s children.” Think of Christopher Milne, angry that he was Christopher Robin; Vivian Burnett, pulling Little Lord Fauntleroy behind her; Alastair Grahame, lying on the railway tracks.

This is fertile, as Byatt discovered, as a book for adults. American author Melissa Albert, a best-selling children’s author, has created the title of her first book for adults. Ana’s main character is Guinevere Sharpe, who as an adult is haunted by the history of her childhood. Her mother, Edith, a version of the JK Rowling / Enid Blyton team, wrote a children’s fantasy series called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as characters.

He didn’t know it at the time, but he was becoming famous as Christopher Robin – and all that meant. In the novel’s present day, the elder Guin takes care of her mother’s legacy. He’s releasing a ghost-written and vivid memoir of the years he and Ennis spent running around the countryside where Edith wrote the books that chronicled their lives.

But the truth, as Albert’s sometimes dysfunctional triplets inform us little by little, is darker than Guin’s memoir suggests. Her father, Llewellyn, was a handsome and successful actor whose career flourished after he left his wife to run away with Edith, a young woman. After a brief and unhappy engagement in Venice, they left with their two young children for rural Vermont in the late 1990s: she, to write; him, to start filming and have an experience with a series of young admirers.

Their marriage is turning toxic. Edith is distant and cold. The loving and boisterous Llewellyn is stricken with an unknown illness and the light begins to shine through him. And the children, devoted to each other and freed from the need for higher education, are left to their own devices. Meanwhile, there is something very scary about their old wooden house. Magic on top. Residents are having nightmares. Edith shows up one day with a missing finger.

In this case, Edith and Llewellyn died in a house fire; the sixth and final book in the Ninth City series is unpublished; and Guin and Ennis, once very close, have been silent for twenty years. An artist of imagination who builds strange settings, Ennis has always refused to talk about his childhood and the books of the Ninth City – but as Guin announces his memoirs, he announces a new program called Mother. The story follows Guin’s nervous reactions as we count down to opening day and the inevitable confrontation. Meanwhile, the third thread fills in Guin’s experiences between the death of her parents and the present.

What we know about the ninth installment of City – that in its universe there is a mysterious figure called the Architect who steals children’s dreams to build fantasy worlds all the time – casts an ominous shadow on Guin’s story. You get the sense that Albert has something to say about the production, and the price. Edith is a brilliant children’s writer – but she’s not good.

One of the fun things about Children is that you go through it before you realize what, exactly, it is. Is it a psychological drama, a home story for the deaf, or a dark tale? We are certainly keeping them in the dark, or rather the whole part of them. We wonder why Guin, who is a talented writer, refused to write her own novels. We wonder how the house caught fire. We wonder what is going on with the mysterious Edith and her demonic typing. We wonder why Ennis is so difficult, and why one of his installations seems to have killed an alien a few years ago. What is the charm that Edith wears around her neck? Why, in this case, the loss of his finger at the time seemed like no problem?

These big secrets are a slight weakness of an otherwise easy-to-read and engaging book. There is so much going on that the power of the story is lost: Edith never reaches a conclusion; Guin’s fractured relationship with her boyfriend, Hank, though clearly described, struggles to carry the weight it deserves; the end is a little too fast. Despite Albert’s insistence on his backstory and fantasy, the clarity and simplicity with which the myth derives its power eludes him.