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The Children is just my kind of story: a gothic tale with a little touch of horror (that’s about all I’m interested in) set in the world of books. I enjoyed it, but it ended up just a touch darker than I would have preferred, I think. And it took me a whole week to read, for some reason; it’s just 416 pages but felt like a really long book. So while I appreciated it, I don’t think I would read it now had I been able to warn myself. I’d have just skipped it.
Guinevere Sharp and her brother, Ennis, grew up in the shadow of the extremely popular children’s books their mother wrote. Edith created a series of five fantasy novels that became a phenomenon, like Harry Potter. The magical stories made Guin and Ennis famous as well because Edith wrote them into the books as the main characters. (This was not something they welcomed, mind you.)
The final book was never written because Edith and her husband, as well as some guests, all died in a fire when Guin was 11. The home was where the family had lived for five or six years: a large old farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere, Vermont. The children ran wild, the woods their home; their once-famous actor father painted in the barn; and their mother typed like mad in the creepy attic room.
Now, 20 years later, Guin has released a memoir about her childhood, which touches not at all on the dysfunction she actually experienced. She’s just been promoting the book, when she sees notices that her brother is about to open a new art installation simply titled Mother. As close as they were as children, Guin hasn’t seen Ennis since she was about 16, though she’s chased him around the world following his popular art exhibits.
The story of The Children goes back and forth between present and past, showing the dark reality behind what the world thought about the Sharpe family and the books. There’s a lot of darkness: touches of horror, possible magic, family dysfunction and parental neglect. Guin is a hollowed-out adult, well provided for thanks to the income from her mother’s books, but lacking in happiness and life satisfaction. There are parts just missing.
I was curious about the whole mystery underpinning The Children, what exactly happened years earlier, what’s going on now, what the fictional series was about, etc. So I kept with it. And the ending was… interesting. It fit. But it was a bit of a slog and revealed too much soullessness, which I didn’t enjoy.
Rated: High. Profanity includes at least 25 uses of strong language (this is weird, but while the Kindle search function says there are only these, I was sure there were a lot more as I read), around 40 instances of moderate profanity, about 30 uses of mild language, and about 45 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes kissing, references to sex, some mentions of nudity, description of a painting of a nude female, affairs, and a couple of brief scenes where some description of a sex act occurs. Violence includes loss of a finger, mentions of blood and deaths.
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