The Children

Guinevere Sharpe grows up twice in Melissa Albert's novel: once in the woods around her family's isolated Vermont farmhouse, and once in the pages of her mother Edith's world-famous Ninth City books, which made Guinevere and her brother Ennis household names. The real childhood is no idyll, since the siblings are growing up nearly feral, unwashed and underfed. As the books become hugely popular, the dangers of fame grow until a night when fire leaves Edith's series unfinished and her children the only survivors. Twenty years on, Guinevere is promoting a ghostwritten memoir when Ennis, now an artist, announces an installation called Mother.

Jenna Bush Hager included it on her Read With Jenna book club list for the Today Show.