Harper
Published June 9, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
What can be made of the fact that two novels about immensely successful children’s book authors who came from poverty and have left a troubled legacy for their adult children were published within a week of one another? Probably nothing other than strange coincidence, given the two books are utterly different in style and tone. The Children by Melissa Albert is strange and haunted, written in immensely poetic language and completely unpredictable. Based on a True Story plays with a similar concept – what is true in fiction, and how might fiction distort the truth? – but it is a much more conventional thriller that throws a stressed family into a heightened situation with a clock ticking loudly to build suspense.
Dame Eleanor Kingman is about to celebrate her eightieth birthday in a new home (just one of many) – a mansion in Cornwall on a cliff above the sea, inviting a large number of her publishing-world acquaintances to the lavish event. Her daughters are in attendance to help. The eldest has spent her life working for her mother’s literary empire and has secretly decided she’s had enough, planning to resign the minute the festivities are over. The middle daughter is a dutiful accountant who manages her financial affairs and has just been blindsided by her husband, who has racked up an impossible gambling debt; he wants her to ask her wealthy mother to bail them out, but she knows it’s hopeless. Her mother is famously stingy about her immense wealth. The youngest is her mother’s favorite, despite being frequently in trouble and recently in rehab. She’s now an influencer who commands an audience for schmaltzy pronouncements that she doesn’t actually believe in.
To add to this stew of dissatisfaction, Dame Eleanor has been receiving threatening emails, promising to reveal her dark secret at the event, a secret she has hidden for decades but which provided fodder for a youthful manuscript that was never published. Did the typewritten pages somehow survive? Will people who read it see through the fiction to tie it to events in her past? Will her money-printing writing career come to an ignominious end? It’s hard to decide how to proceed, given the bustle of the party preparations and the presence of a film crew that is making a bio-pic about the popular children’s author.
Sarah Vaughan has a good time developing the main characters with their various crises on the boil, adding an illustrator for a recent book who provides a refreshing outsider perspective on the family. There are various publishing industry threads, including rival agents and hints that Dame Eleanor at times appropriated others’ plot ideas without credit. And there’s a couple of strangers wandering about, causing consternation, as well as some threatening heavies come to collect a debt. It’s all tied up neatly in the end, with a not-too-surprising villain revealed along with the dark secret.
Altogether, while it’s not ground-breaking, it’s an agreeable way to spend a few hours with people in extreme situations acting out various family rivalries and grudges.