Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
I didn’t really enjoy Albert’s Hazelwood, but had hopes for this one, but again, I think she has issues with one with the book premise sounding great, and then the execution not really working. I had similar issues with the characters not really drawing you in as you read. I know I was supposed to see Guinevere’s mother Edith as dark figure (she gets mentioned as being similar to Persephone and the dark queen of Hades) but she just seemed pathetic to me. Also, again, things are not told to readers in a logical way. I think Albert flipping back and forth between Guinevere and Ennis as children, and then Guinevere as an adult was the reason why most of the book didn’t hang together very well. I wonder if it would have worked if she broke it into two parts. Part one with Guin as a child and then later as an adult. We also get a plethora of other characters introduced throughout and honestly I could not recall all of them. I guessed at what was going on very early in the book and the reveal was just lacking any type of punch to it.
The Children follows Guinevere Sharpe, daughter of a famous children’s author and actor who we know died when she was younger. Guinevere had a ghostwriter write her memoir recalling her childhood with her famous parents. When her estranged and infamous brother, Ennis though decides to put on an art installation titled Mother Guinevere is scared what he plans on revealing. And how that may impact her book. And then Guinevere starts remembering her childhood with her family at the farm and the things that occurred there.
As I said above, the characters on the whole don’t work. I didn’t like or dislike Guinevere as an adult, she’s just a non-entity. Her depiction as a child was much more developed. I honestly think the childhood portions as I said above were done better as a whole. You get to see the entire Sharpe family dynamic and the things that caused her parents to turn to and then away from each other. Guinevere as an adult is just a mess with a fiancée and so many secrets she’s keeping from him and herself that you tire of it pretty quickly. There’s so many other characters to wade through too. You have Guinevere’s PR person, her publisher, her fiancée, her brother’s assistant, journalists, etc. And then when you get tossed back to the childhood portions there’s authors, artists, and others in that one too.
The flow of the book was up and down since there was a lot of things left unsaid and the ending/reveal of things just didn’t pack the punch that I think Albert wanted it to. I just thought too many things were still tossed out via infodump that really didn’t make a lot of sense to me even a little. I guessed I said at what went on at the house and was right, but I had to wonder at a lot of things at that point. Maybe if Albert had done points of views with Guinevere’s parents it would have worked a bit more? Or even shown us Ennis’s point of view. I just thought the whole book/storyline came across as flat.
