In her first novel for adults, the YA author explores the dark side of writers who fictionalise their children\u2019s lives<\/p>\n
Children\u2019s writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged. And, as AS Byatt put it crisply when talking about her 2009 novel The Children\u2019s Book: \u201cWriting children\u2019s books isn\u2019t good for the writer\u2019s own children.\u201d Think of Christopher Milne, raging at having been Christopher Robin; Vivian Burnett, dragging Little Lord Fauntleroy behind him; Alastair Grahame, lying down on train tracks.<\/p>\n
This is fertile material, as Byatt recognised, for a grown-up book. The American author Melissa Albert, herself a very successful children\u2019s writer, has made it the theme of her first adult novel. The Children\u2019s protagonist is Guinevere Sharpe, who as a grown woman is trapped by a very public version of her childhood. Her mother, Edith, a sort of JK Rowling\/Enid Blyton composite, wrote an era-defining run of children\u2019s portal fantasies called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as the named protagonists.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/f25c45362ea5a80c8230c496caf567c33188b5b6\/0_0_996_797\/master\/996.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=2b036352c90153e35867074f53a844f5\" "\\"The")
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