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The Children's Crusade: A Novel
by Ann Packer
Hardcover : 448 pages
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Bill Blair finds the land by ...
Introduction
From the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, a sweeping, masterful new novel that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades.
Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of the family he has yet to create, Bill buys the property on a whim. In Penny Greenway he finds a suitable wife, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life seems compelling and answerable, and they marry and have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, at a time when women chafed at the conventions imposed on them. She finds salvation in art, but the cost is high.
Thirty years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence and all-too-familiar troubles force a reckoning with who they are, separately and together, and set off a struggle over the family’s future. One by one, the siblings take turns telling the story—Robert, a doctor like their father; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; Ryan, a schoolteacher; and James, the malcontent, the problem child, the only one who hasn’t settled down—their narratives interwoven with portraits of the family at crucial points in their history.
Reviewers have praised Ann Packer’s “brilliant ear for character” (The New York Times Book Review), her “naturalist’s vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented” (The New Yorker), and the “utterly lifelike quality of her book’s everyday detail” (The New York Times). Her talents are on dazzling display in The Children’s Crusade, an extraordinary study in character, a rare and wise examination of the legacy of early life on adult children attempting to create successful families and identities of their own. This is Ann Packer’s most deeply affecting book yet.
Editorial Review
An Amazon Best Book of April 2015: Have you ever come across a family with secrets? One that, no matter how educated, well-heeled, and essentially decent, still manages to miss connections, hurt each other and harbor ancient slights for what seems like forever? For you, reading Ann Packer’s new novel may bring you comfort if not joy. (If you’ve never known or been that kind of family. . .well, then you’re either a saint or a liar). Packer lays out the story of the Blair family, father/doctor Bill, his wife Penny and their four children, the last of whom, James (it is obvious from the beginning, if only because he’s the sole sibling with a non-R name) was unexpected, a mistake. Beginning in northern California in 1954 – “long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley” – Packer takes us through five decades in the lives of the Blair family via the voices of its members; but if Robert, Ryan, Rebecca and James are the storytellers here, it is their mother Penny who is the heart of the book. Married to a man who’s almost too perfect to be true, Penny is a would-be artist who chafed at the traditional role society had assigned her and who must, ultimately, make choices on her own behalf. In vigilant detail, Packer chronicles the seemingly tiny ways that personal needs and memories from childhood make us the people we can’t help but be for the rest of our lives. – Sara Nelson
Guest Review of The Children's Crusade
By Kate Walbert
Photo credit: Deborah Donenfeld
Photo credit: Elena Seibert
Kate Walbert is the author of A Short History of Women, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2009 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2004, The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the 2002 Connecticut Book Award in Fiction in 2002, and Where She Went, a collection of linked stories and a New York Times Notable Book. Her forthcoming novel, The Sunken Cathedral, will be published by Scribner in June, 2015.
One of the many reasons I’m wild about Ann Packer’s intricate and dazzling tour-de-force of a new novel, The Children’s Crusade, is because in Penny Blair she’s created one of the most complicated, infuriating, intelligent, unlikeable/likeable and ultimately true female characters I’ve ever read. But then again, this is Ann Packer, a writer whose generosity of spirit and enormous talent infuses every small detail with a kind of luminous, shiny quality and wonder; a writer who somehow, as if by magic, imbues her characters with a level of complexity that rings so true you would swear you had met them before, in real life, so that finishing The Children’s Crusade feels like you’ve just left a family reunion with one of the most fascinating clans you’ll ever meet.
The novel opens with Penny’s soon-to-be-husband Bill Blair, newly returned from Korea and on a carefree, convertible drive through the northern California countryside. Bill soon discovers a majestic California live oak that will root him to the landscape forever. (And that oak! My vote is for The Children’s Crusade to get cover of the year, the image of the oak’s gnarly limbs entwining the title, nay, the word children, a perfect rendering of Packer’s brilliant metaphor.) It is the 1950s. Bill is back from the war eager to turn his attention to building a career and settling down, and Penny, whom he meets and marries in quick succession soon after, dreams of her own escape and fulfillment —“for Penny, it seemed to her that the formlessness of her life until now had been a kind of prepayment for the many perfections of her husband …”. (Full disclosure: I immediately wanted to share this novel with my mother.)
But Packer only momentarily lingers in this 1950s haze before fast-forwarding to the messy morning after: Penny in a hot kitchen shooing her four young children, the three R’s—Robert, Rebecca, and Ryan—as well as the baby, the mistake, James, out the door as she furiously prepares for the annual Blair family party. One senses she’d rather chew glass. It’s stifling; she’s burned the cookies; the children are buzzing about like gnats. Soon Bill, now a salt-of-the-earth pediatrician whose goodness casts an increasingly dark shadow over Penny’s tricky contours, will ramble up to cool off the atmosphere, but not before it’s clear that something is terribly wrong in the Blair household, and the children will suffer the consequences.
The Children’s Crusade is the kind of book you can’t put down, the kind of book you neglect your own small, domestic and professional fires to race back to again and again. The story reads like a psychological thriller without the blood and gore, the damage more insidious and real and far reaching. Packer, true to form, creates the perfect compelling structure for the book: chapters chronicling Penny Blair’s messy evolution from housewife to artist alternate with first-person accounts from her now grown children of their own lives and marriages, and the ways in which the Blair family dance continues. The result is an epic tale as far reaching as the California horizon, a novel that portrays all the tragedies, and joys, of a real American family of the late 20th century.
Discussion Questions
No discussion questions at this time.Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
"A riveting novel about how family molds us for good an ill--and the grace that comes with forgiveness."--People Magazine--Best Books of 2015Book Club Recommendations
Recommended to book clubs by 2 of 2 members.
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