The Children

Thanks to NetGalley, William Morrow, HarperAudio Adult, I got to read The Children by Melissa Albert with my eyes and ears over the weekend, and I loved it. The audiobook enchanted me immediately, beautifully narrated by Rebecca Lowman and with its fully produced first chapter of the story within the story, and as the fictional world gave way to the darker reality within, I remained so.
The Children bounces between Guinevere's adult self and her child self - really her two child selves - the self from the "real" world and the one from the pages of the Ninth City books, a series of bestselling children's books her mother wrote in which she and her brother Ennis were the stars.
I have written and rewritten this review at least five times. The book is so beautifully written that I want my review to talk about how it's really just a fairy tale to make you think about your own childhood and how the legacy of it impacts your life today and how much you should let it, about the stories you tell yourself then and now, about the way our adult memory clarifies the way we saw the world as children except when it doesn't.
Maybe I'm already doing the same thing to this book - yes, it is that, but it's also a story about a sister and a brother, the bonds they forged during their childhood of neglect even as the world assumed they were charmed, and how that bond carried them through life even during their estrangement. 
It's also an engaging mystery, as I turned page after page so I could understand what was going on then, how it relates to what's going on now, and how it's all going to turn out.
We see Guin writing as a child, so why did she have a ghostwriter do her memoir? She and Ennis were inseparable, why did he stop talking to her? What really happened on the night of the fire that killed their parents?
I am not telling you, so go read The Children right now so we can talk about it.