The Children by Melissa Albert review, intriguing fairytale of creativity’s dangers
Article excerpt
Melissa Albert's debut adult novel, *The Children*, examines how writers weaponize their own children's lives for literary material. The book explores the unsettling intersection of parental love and artistic ambition, asking whether a writer's need to transform lived experience into fiction justifies exposing their kids to public scrutiny and potential harm. Albert, known for her YA work, ventures into darker territory here, crafting a fairytale-inflected narrative that treats creativity itself as a dangerous, sometimes corrosive force. The novel suggests that the act of fictionalizing family becomes a kind of betrayal, one rationalized by artistic necessity but felt acutely by those who live it.
In her first novel for adults, the YA author explores the dark side of writers who fictionalise their children’s lives
Children’s writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged. And, as AS Byatt put it crisply when talking about her 2009 novel The Children’s Book: “Writing children’s books isn’t good for the writer’s own children.” Think of Christopher Milne, raging at having been Christopher Robin; Vivian Burnett, dragging Little Lord Fauntleroy behind him; Alastair Grahame, lying down on train tracks.
This is fertile material, as Byatt recognised, for a grown-up book. The American author Melissa Albert, herself a very successful children’s writer, has made it the theme of her first adult novel. The Children’s protagonist is Guinevere Sharpe, who as a grown woman is trapped by a very public version of her childhood. Her mother, Edith, a sort of JK Rowling/Enid Blyton composite, wrote an era-defining run of children’s portal fantasies called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as the named protagonists.
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