An intoxicating, haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she lives in the wooded shadow of her family’s isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of her mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where her magical adventures have made her a household name. In reality, Guinevere’s childhood isn’t the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and her older brother are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the lichen-clotted woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother’s name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family’s legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she’s spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s creative genius?

Wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, The Children whispers to you from the hallway outside your bedroom, lights flickering as you turn the pages of a book that didn’t seem so scary a moment ago. It’s a story for anyone who’s ever revisited an old favorite and found it cast in a darker light, the line separating magic and memory blurring as the gap widens between the authors we imagined and the people they turn out to be.

I really wanted to love this book. The synopsis made it sound dark and unsettling (which I love), but sadly, it just didn’t land for me.

The story focuses on a woman named Guin and her older brother, Ennis. They are the children of Edith Sharpe, the beloved author behind a wildly popular fantasy series, and supposedly the real life inspiration for the kids in the books. In reality, Guin and Ennis grew up neglected and nearly feral at an isolated Vermont farmhouse. They were ignored by their parents while their mother mined their lives for material. The two relied on each other to survive until a fire destroyed the house and killed their parents and the final manuscript of the series unfinished. Years later, Guin is promoting a ghostwritten memoir that leans into the fairy tale version of her upbringing, when her estranged brother, now a reclusive artist who hasn’t spoken to her in decades, announces a new art installation titled Mother. As strange incidents start disrupting Guin’s carefully controlled public life, old memories she’s spent years repressing resurface, forcing her to finally confront what actually happened the night everything burned down.

The concept is strong and the story is actually really good at its core. The problem is it felt like the author was trying to juggle too many things (including genres) at once. It reminded me a lot of how a season of American Horror Story sometimes starts out really strong before throwing so many ideas into the mix that everything gets muddled and overstuffs itself (I’m looking at you “Freakshow”). The characters are fantastic and layered and the writing is beautiful on a sentence level, but the creepiness the whole book is built around took way too long to show up and when it did it didn’t reach its full potential.

The pacing is where I struggled most. Things move incredibly slowly, and I caught my mind wandering more than a few times. I felt like I was on the cusp of something really great, but it never quite developed into what it could have been.

I really wanted to love this one, and I think under different circumstances (like a tighter edit or a narrower focus) I might have. As it stands though, nothing really landed for me, and I found myself bored for most of the book.

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