The Children by Melissa Albert review โ intriguing fairytale of creativityโs dangers
In her first novel for adults, the YA author explores the dark side of writers who fictionalise their childrenโs lives Childrenโs writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged. And, as AS Byatt put it crisply when talking about her 2009 novel The Childrenโs Book: โWriting childrenโs books isnโt good for the writerโs own children.โ 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 childrenโs writer, has made it the theme of her first adult novel. The Childrenโs 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 childrenโs portal fantasies called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as the named protagonists. Continue reading...