The Enchanted Siblings: Melissa Albert's Debut Is the Dark Fairy Tale Adults Deserve
There is something faintly unsettling about authors who write their children into their fiction. C.S. Lewis gave a young girl named Lucy a wardrobe and a whole second world. J.M. Barrie handed Peter Pan to the boys who inspired him and then never quite let go. The practice sits somewhere between homage and possession, and Melissa Albert has made it the engine of her first adult novel.
The Children (Morrow/HarperCollins, June 2026) begins with a mother who was, by all accounts, a brilliant fantasist. She wrote a beloved series of novels featuring her own children — Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe — as the protagonists. Then tragedy intervened, the family fractured, and the books became artifacts of a childhood that didn't end well.
Now, years later, Guinevere is promoting a ghostwritten memoir about her unusual upbringing, while Ennis is preparing an art exhibition titled simply “Mother” — one that threatens to reopen every wound the siblings thought they'd managed to close. Kirkus called the result “a chilling and twisted fairy tale,” which seems right. The novel draws from the same wells as Lewis and Barrie, but where those authors offered escape, Albert offers reckoning.
The book has just been named Jenna Bush Hager's June pick for the Today show book club — which means approximately eight million Americans will now buy it before understanding what they've signed up for. Hager compared it to Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and that feels accurate: this is fiction that uses the grammar of enchantment to talk about the damage families do to each other.
Albert has written three acclaimed YA novels — The Hazel Wood, The Night Country, A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall — which means she arrives here already knowing how to build a world that unsettles without becoming chaos. The step into adult literary fiction is the step into ambiguity, into characters who cannot simply be rescued, and Albert, it seems, was ready for that.
The only question worth asking is whether Guinevere and Ennis will, in the end, be able to separate the story their mother told from the life they actually lived. Most of us, if we're honest, are still trying to do exactly that.
