20 Jun 2026
issue 20 June 2026
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Who would be a child made famous by a book? A.A. Milne’s son, immortalised as the teddy-trailing Christopher Robin in the ‘Pooh’ books, became a global celebrity and was remorselessly bullied at school for the privilege. Alastair, the spoilt offspring who inspired Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, felt moved to step in front of a train at university in return. And it is perhaps best for Alice Liddell that she never lived to read contemporary concerns about Lewis Carroll’s true motives for immortalising her in his Wonderland.
This cost to children for enabling, even fuelling, an adult’s artistic ambition, is the starting point for the American YA author Melissa Albert’s first novel for adults, The Children. Guinevere (‘Guin’) and Ennis Sharpe find themselves unwilling celebrities with an obsessive fanbase when their mother Edith, after years of failure, finally has a breakout hit with her bestselling ‘Ninth City’ fantasy series, which features both siblings as named characters exploring a parallel dream world overseen by a mysterious ‘Architect’. It’s a series which readers later tended to recall as ‘darker than I remember. Crueller, stranger, more haunted by longing and loss. All good children’s books are.’ But adventures in the Ninth City were abruptly and notoriously brought to a close when a devastating house fire killed Edith, her husband, her agent and her friends, leaving the two stars of her books suddenly orphaned.
