The Children by MELISSA ALBERT is a twisting, captivating tale of the estranged adult children of legendary author Edith Sharpe. After she wrote her own children into her beloved ‘Ninth City’ fantasy series, Guin and Ennis have to contend with legacy, fame, memory, and the darkness lurking in their idyllic farmhouse home.

Read on for a Q&A with Melissa on her multi-genre story.

MEET MELISSA ALBERT

What sparked the idea for The Children?

Revisiting children’s books I loved as a kid with my own child and finding them darker than I remembered. I was thinking a lot about Christopher Robin Milne, the sometimes ambivalent, sometimes tormented inspiration for (and namesake of) the child at the centre of his father, A.A. Milne’s, ‘Winnie the Pooh‘ books. Learning that he spent many years hating the fame his father’s work forced on him kind of haunted me as I read the tales of the Hundred Acre Wood to my son, who was then just exactly Christopher Robin’s age.

This is your adult debut, so how did you find the switch from writing YA to adult fiction?

It felt like a very natural progression from my YA, which was already moving in tone toward the adult space. It was a joy writing adult characters from an adult perspective – but honestly writing child characters with that sense of dread and foreknowledge was maybe even more fun.

The Children has been marketed as horror, literary fiction, magical realism, fantasy and Gothic fiction – how would you describe it?

A dual timeline meta-fantasy about children’s books, family history, art making, and the stories we tell to and about ourselves.

What were some of the inspirations for the magical Ninth City series? Your previous YA duology ‘The Hazel Wood’ involved a book of dark fairy tales, so does The Children have a fairy tale/folktale element to it?

Though the ‘Ninth City’s’ nearest inspiration was The Chronicles of Narnia’, I knew I wanted to make the setting an actual semi-modern city, rather than defaulting to that classic fairy tale kingdom feeling – forests, horses, swords – that I’d already used for the portal world in the ‘Hazel Wood’ books. I also gave the worldbuilding a vampiric element, to make the fantasy realm itself predatory toward children in a way that mirrored what was happening outside its pages.

Guin’s mother, Edith Sharpe, names characters in her ‘Ninth City’ books after her son and daughter. As she spends her childhood living in an unforgiving public spotlight, how does this fame affect Guin in her adult life?

Guin and her brother have very different relationships with their fame. He rejects it entirely, whereas she uses it: to give her life shape, but for other reasons as well, that become clear as you read. But they both, in their way, make art about it. She releases a ghostwritten memoir that paints her childhood as lovely and enviable, whereas her brother becomes an artist whose thematic debt to his mother’s work he never, ever cops to.

This story is split between two timelines: Guin’s childhood, and her adulthood dealing with the consequences of past tragedy. Was one timeline more challenging to write?

I think the hardest part was balancing the backstory’s compression many years boiled down to certain scenes and sequences that stand out most powerfully in Guin’s mind – against the hour by hour-ness of the present day. I will say the rotten-storybook feeling of the backstory thread made it extremely fun to write.

Could you dive a little deeper into the relationship between Guin and Ennis. Why is Guin so rattled by Ennis announcing that his new art show will be titled ‘Mother’?

Answering that is at the heart of the story. No spoilers from me!

Like Inkheart, A Monster Calls, and A Study in Drowning, The Children contains a story-within-a-story through Edith Sharpe’s magical books. Do you think you will ever explore the world of ‘Ninth City’ in its own instalment?

I’ve done that once before, with Tales from the Hinterland, the book within the world of the ‘Hazel Wood’ duology. But that was very contained: a single book of tales. In the case of the five existing books of the ‘Ninth City’ series, I intend to leave them inside the world of the book.

Can you describe The Children in three words?

Unsettling, magical, dreadful (as in, full of dread).

What’s next for you? Any projects on the horizon?

I’m working on something I can’t yet talk about. But I’ll be very excited to share more when it’s time!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melissa Albert is the New York Times and indie bestselling author of The Bad Ones, Our Crooked Hearts, and the ‘Hazel Wood‘ series. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and included in the New York Times list of Notable Children’s Books. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Follow Melissa Albert on Instagram here.

Read more about The Children on the Bloomsbury website.