Synopsis:
Their childhood was yours. They want it back . . .
Guinevere’s late mother, Edith Sharpe, needs little introduction. Bestselling author of the unendingly successful Ninth Cityseries, her books brought so much joy and inspired the imagination of countless children the world over. Guin’s childhood with her mother, brother Ennis and her actor father was a blissful, bohemian affair, filled with continuous laughter and surrounded by artistic types in their Vermont barnhouse. At least, this is the story Guin presents as she prepares for the press tour for her upcoming memoir about life in the Sharpe family.
Now estranged from her brother and her parents long dead after a devastating fire, strange events threaten the veneer of serenity and familial harmony Guin is keen to project. Ennis, now a notorious artist with a troubled past, announces a new installation – his first since a disastrous last show one year prior – simply entitled Mother. And Guin can’t help but worry that the truth behind their idyllic childhood is about to blow her world apart.
Told in alternating narratives between 1990s Vermont and present-day New York, The Children is a twisting narrative of family secrets and long-held resentments, which asks whether we can ever really exorcise the ghosts of a childhood forsaken in favour of a parent’s artistic vision.
Review:
I went in knowing nothing except that it’s dark, a play on fairytales, and features wild siblings. Those are hit words for me.
The story alternates between siblings’ feral, isolated 1990s childhood in rural Vermont and the present-day fallout of their famous mother’s legacy as a legendary author of a children’s fantasy series. The siblings didn’t have the magical, glamorous childhood their mother cultivated to the public.
Now estranged, they are both spinning their own tales and hiding from the reality of their neglectful, toxic, bohemian childhood.
There was always some lack or ache or unappeased appetite, and all of it held her in a perpetual state of noticing. Vigilance, they called it, though she didn’t know that then. Need had pinned her so neatly inside her skin, made her live hour to hour like an animal. She was underfed and isolated; she was envied and dreamed about. Her whole life was limned in shadow and gold.
I expected this to be a bit darker, more whimsically horror; subverting tropes. This was more of an internal character study on the girl and then the woman who was always perceived outside of her own agency.
I thought the ending would be more wild than it was, but it was mostly satisfying for a shorter standalone.
More rooted in reality and the paradoxical phenomena and its effects, this is a good story to get lost in if you ever wondered what a parallel-universe Narnia might be like.
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