The Children
Melissa Albert’s The Children isn’t just something you read. It’s something you breathe. It whispers at the nape of your neck, tugs at a hangnail. And what a thrill it is to be haunted by something like this ... From an eerie start to an astonishing finish, The Children seeps into every pore. You won’t quite know what’s real: our heroes, or how we remembered them being kinder than they ever actually were, and our perception of the art they make.
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One of the pleasures of The Children is that you’re quite some way through it before you figure out what, exactly, it is. Is it a psychological drama, a haunted house story, or a dark fairytale? ... That bumper crop of mysteries is also a slight weakness of this very readable and intriguing book. There’s simply so much going on that the force of the story dissipates ... While Albert assiduously seeds her backstory with fairytale motifs, the clarity and simplicity from which fairytales draw their power eludes her.
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It always feels risky to move from young adult to adult fiction ... But Albert manages the transition smoothly. The novel is sophisticated in its exploration of the complex relationship dynamics at play ... The novel takes a touch too long to reach its resolution, and its ending feels somewhat out of step with the Guin we’ve come to know. But the sheer pleasure of its reading overrides these niggles, and contemporary fantasy could certainly do with more sophisticated, updated takes on the genre like this one.
