The Children by Melissa Albert is a haunting story about the danger of becoming someone else’s myth

There’s something deeply unsettling about the idea of growing up inside a story that never really belonged to you. In The Children by Melissa Albert, releasing June 2, 2026, childhood becomes both a performance and a prison as two siblings struggle to survive the legacy their mother built from their lives. The result is a darkly hypnotic literary fantasy that feels as though it’s flickering between reality and nightmare the entire time you’re reading it.

Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe grew up as the unwilling inspirations for their mother Edith’s wildly beloved Ninth City fantasy novels. To the world, they were magical children adventuring through an enchanted realm. In reality, they were neglected kids growing up isolated in rural Vermont, half-feral and largely abandoned while their mother disappeared into the mythology she was creating around them. Albert builds both timelines—the children’s traumatic upbringing and adult Guin’s unraveling in the present day—with a sense of inevitable catastrophe. Every chapter feels like a countdown toward something terrible waiting just beyond the firelight.

That atmosphere is what makes the novel so effective. The story is tinged with darkness around the edges, like shadows moving just outside the glow of a bonfire. Even during its quieter moments, there’s a persistent sense that something is wrong beneath the surface. Guin’s carefully maintained public persona begins collapsing as she approaches the opening of Ennis’s mysterious art installation, Mother, while fragments of buried childhood memories begin resurfacing with increasing menace. Meanwhile, the past timeline slowly reveals just how dangerous Edith Sharpe’s obsession with her fictional world became for the real children trapped inside it.

One of the novel’s strongest ideas is the violation at the center of Edith’s success. She transformed her children into public property without their consent, turning their identities into a bestselling fantasy phenomenon before they were old enough to understand what was happening to them. The emotional damage of that exploitation lingers across every page of the novel. Edith spends more time with the imaginary versions of Guin and Ennis than she does with the actual children themselves, pouring all her love and attention into Ninth City while her real family deteriorates around her.

But Albert complicates the story in fascinating ways because Ninth City may not be entirely imaginary. Rumors persist throughout the novel that Edith didn’t invent the fantasy world at all—that she somehow discovered it. Albert keeps the line between psychological fantasy and literal magic deliberately blurred, and that uncertainty becomes the engine driving the entire book. Is Ninth City real? Are Guin’s memories unreliable? Did Edith lose herself in fantasy, or was she trying to protect her children from something genuinely supernatural? The novel never rushes to provide easy answers, and that ambiguity gives the story much of its power.

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The emotional core of the novel also rests in the fractured relationship between Guin and Ennis. Ennis has spent years rejecting the mythology built around their family, distancing himself from Guin after the fire that destroyed their home and killed their parents. As the novel progresses, their estrangement becomes one of its central mysteries. Albert carefully peels back layers of resentment, trauma, guilt, and memory until the full weight of their shared past finally begins to emerge.

There’s a distinctly 11/22/63 quality to the novel at times, particularly in the way ordinary reality seems to brush against another world just out of reach. While Stephen King’s novel is rooted in time travel rather than fantasy, both books share that uncanny feeling of stepping sideways into a place that feels impossible yet strangely tangible. Stephen King’s influence can also be felt in the novel’s atmosphere: the slow-building dread, the damaged families, the sense that childhood trauma leaves permanent supernatural scars. Still, The Children never feels derivative. Albert’s voice remains entirely her own—lyrical, eerie, and emotionally raw.

What makes the novel linger after the final page is the way it understands childhood stories themselves. The Children recognizes that the books we love as children often become stranger and darker when revisited as adults. Comfort curdles into unease. Nostalgia becomes haunted. Albert taps directly into that feeling, exploring how memory reshapes stories over time and how stories, in turn, reshape us.

The Children is not a fast-paced fantasy adventure despite its premise. It’s slower, moodier, and more psychologically driven than readers may initially expect. But for readers willing to sink into its atmosphere, the novel offers a deeply unsettling meditation on fame, authorship, family trauma, and the dangerous seduction of fantasy worlds that threaten to become more real than reality itself.

If you’re drawn to literary fantasy steeped in grief, fractured memory, and creeping dread, this is one worth picking up when it releases on June 2, 2026.

What are your favorite novels about dangerous fantasy worlds or childhood stories that become darker with age? Share your recommendations and thoughts in the comments.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Related Content

• Cults, covens, and childhood goddesses: A conversation with author Melissa Albert (Reactor)
• Review: The Night Country by Melissa Albert (The Story Sanctuary)
• The Children is an homage to childhood and the ‘dissonance between truth and fiction’ (People)

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