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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Ann Packer is the acclaimed author of two collections of short fiction, Swim Back to Me and Mendocino and Other Stories , and two bestselling novels, Songs Without Words and The Dive from Clausen's Pier , which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award, among many other prizes and honors. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies, and her novels have been published around the world. She lives in San Carlos, California.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1954, pediatrician Bill Blair buys three acres of land in California and marries his girlfriend, Penny. They have four children. Dissatisfied as a housewife and mother, Penny moves into the shed, becomes an artist, and eventually abandons the family. The children grow up but still bear the emotional scars and resentments of childhood, which come to the fore when the youngest wants to sell their childhood home. This novel presents a challenge for audio: its chapters jump around among different time periods nonchronologically, and different chapters are told from different points of view-some are written in the omniscient third person, and others are told in first person from the grown children's perspectives. Even with different actors for each first-person character, the story is hard to follow. The narrators all read with expression, but none makes any effort to differentiate the characters' voices at all, save for a slightly higher pitch for female characters. So in scenes of all the adult children arguing, it's difficult to keep track of who is saying what, especially since three of the four main characters have names beginning with R. This is one book that's better fit for print. A Scribner hardcover. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A young doctor buys a piece of land in a place that will later be known as Silicon Valley, building a house that will shape his family for decades. Packer (Swim Back to Me, 2011, etc.) is an expert at complicated relationships; she likes to show more than two sides to every story. Who's responsible for the fracturing of the Blair family? The obvious answer is Penny, a woman oppressed by domesticity, who retreats from her husband and four children to spend all her time in the shedshe calls it her studiowhere she works on collages and mugs made of too-thick pottery, eventually even sleeping there. Or could her husband, Bill, a pediatrician with endless patience and empathy for kids, have pushed his wife away? Perhaps it was James, the youngest (and unplanned) child, a holy terror from the day he was born, who tipped his family over the edge. In beautifully precise prose, Packer tells the Blairs' story, alternating chapters between the past, when the children were young, and the present, four years after their father's death, when they each get a chance to tell their own stories in the first person. While James has bounced around the world, his siblingsRobert, a doctor; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; and Ryan, a teacherall live near their childhood home, which James wants to sell. Emotions have never had so many shadings as in Packer's fiction; she can tease apart every degree of ambivalence in her characters, multiplying that exponentially when everyone has different desires and they all worry about finding fulfillment while also caring for each otherexcept, perhaps, Penny. But though we rarely see Penny's perspective on why she withdrew from her family, we can fill in the blanks; it's the 1960s and '70s, a time when women were searching for a larger role in the world. Packer seems to set Penny up as the villain, but even that view becomes complicated by the end. When you read Packer, you'll know you're in the hands of a writer who knows what she's doing. A marvelously absorbing novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Told in the most elegant prose, this extraordinarily compassionate tale, set in the Bay Area and spanning 30 years, follows a doctor, his wife, and their four children. Bill Blair is a gifted healer and near-perfect role model who worries that his wife Penny's unhappiness will traumatize their children. With the birth of their fourth child, Penny is suddenly deeply unhappy with her domestic role and opts to turn their garden shed into an art studio, where she spends most of her time. The children, meanwhile, feel her absence deeply and try to lure her back into the fold, with mixed results. Years later, three of the children still reside near their family home: headstrong Robert is, like his father, a doctor; Rebecca, always so helpful as a child, is a psychiatrist; and dreamy, sensitive Ryan is a schoolteacher. But when rootless James, the youngest and always the problem child, suddenly turns up, the family is thrown into disarray and must find a way to recalibrate old dynamics. Packer fully captures the intimacy of this family's life and, by extension, the way the children's interactions impact their adult lives. A masterful portrait of indelible family bonds.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HOW DO WE become who we are? There are many ways of approaching this slipperiest of questions, from the experimental rigor of cognitive neuroscience to the teasing excavations of psychoanalysis. It is, of course, natural territory for the novel, and though Ann Packer's "The Children's Crusade" follows one nuclear family, its scope is broadened by its attempts at an answer. The novel tells the story of the four Blair siblings, each in varying stages of unhappiness: Robert, an insecure and inwardly raging doctor; Rebecca, a grounded psychiatrist married to an immunologist; Ryan, a dreamy and almost painfully sensitive school-teacher; and James, the sole sibling to have moved far from the family's hometown in Northern California, and the novel's prodigal son. James's failure to acquire the trappings of middle-class life - he pursues an affair with a married woman, and perhaps more troubling, has a job at the local Costco - is enough to identify him as the problem sibling, a fact that tells us much about the world Packer is depicting. Its most immediate literary antecedent is Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" (which also features a depressed eldest son, an errant younger son and a sympathetic daughter). Packer observes the discontents of this milieu with a careful eye, at once shrewd and just. "The Children's Crusade" is deftly structured, running on two alternating tracks. The first describes the siblings' fretful childhood, raised by a saintly pediatrician father and a mercurial artist mother. The second leaps forward in time to follow the children's unremarkable, middle-aged fate. They are still unhappy, but in ways that are both more worldly and more diffuse. The novel's structure thus sets up some large questions: To what degree are we shaped by our childhoods? Can we circumvent the influence of the past? Nature versus nurture? After a brief prologue, in which the origin myth of the family is related in some of Packer's best and most rapturous prose, childhood emerges as the true sacred space of the novel - not because it represents innocence, but because it might contain the key to decoding the adult self. As children, the siblings live in a state of near permanent anxiety, in large part owing to the negligence of their mother, Penny, who withdraws from her family and into a nascent artistic career. It's unclear how seriously we are to take her creative practice, which sometimes sounds derivative and parochial; what's never in doubt is the urgency of her need for solitude. "The Children's Crusade" bears a glancing resemblance to Packer's first novel, "The Dive From Clausen's Pier." That novel's narrator is engaged to a man paralyzed in a diving accident, and is both guilt-stricken and self-preserving: She flees her fiancé and goes to New York, but eventually returns, abandoning a course in fashion design, of which she calmly observes, "I wasn't going to have that after all." In Penny, "The Children's Crusade" arms that female narrator with greater ruthlessness, before focusing a forensic eye on the fallout of her retreat. Packer is a connoisseur of the selfish act - both its necessity and its consequences. But how direct is the causal relationship between the mother's absence and the adult child's unhappiness? The four Blair children, although brought up in the same household, have radically different responses to their parents' failings. And to some extent, the novel insists that the children are themselves from the earliest moments of their childhood, the essence of their character already determined. Still, Packer makes several runs at a psychoanalytic explanation for the root problem of James's behavior. (Although Rebecca's husband is a scientist for whom "the mind and its mysteries don't hold a candle to the brain," the domain of neuroscience is only indicated, never really explored.) For example, Rebecca's research leads her to the theory that "James's chaotic character reflected an insecure-ambivalent attachment to their neglectful and distracted mother. ... James had suffered maternal deprivation." That assessment is too glib to be taken seriously, and many of the psychoanalytic ideas are undercut by their presentation in the novel. Packer seems to give more credence to the subtle ways events from the past recur, creating pathways into the present. The recollection of James's childhood poison oak rash persists, conflated with a separate classroom memory: "For the rest of his life he would associate the terrible days of his poison oak with the letter F, never realizing it was the down, up, down, up - sit, stand, sit, stand; the same motions as on his first day with Miss McKinley - that linked them in his mind." these uncanny reverberations are prime material for fiction, and as a form, the novel is uniquely positioned to explore the complexities of how character comes into being. "The Children's Crusade" is beautifully observed but somewhat undermined by the gestures it makes at areas it seems reluctant to fully occupy. Packer never addresses the central question of her novel with much force, and as a whole, the book remains curiously polite. Having covered more traumatic terrain in her previous novels - the accident in "The Dive From Clausen's Pier," suicide in "Songs Without Words" - Packer here restricts herself to the rhythms and landscape of ordinary life, as it is lived by the vast majority. But ordinary life also brings us face to face with the void; therein lies its terror. In "The Children's Crusade," this confrontation takes place largely offstage, most notably in the figure of Penny. The wreckage of her passion is the substance of the novel, even if we never see her emotion face on. In this sense, Freud was right - it's still all about the mother. KATIE KITAMURA'S most recent novel is "Gone to the Forest."
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. The critically acclaimed Packer (The Dive from Clausen's Pier) has written an engrossing story of the Blair family, their secrets, wounds, and struggles for second chances. In 1954, Bill Blair, starting his career as a physician, buys wooded property in the hills near Palo Alto, CA, to build a house and start a family. Sadly, in fewer than ten years, his wife, Penny, always moody and distracted, has distanced herself from Bill and their four children: brilliant Robert, headstrong Rebecca, dreamy Ryan, and wild child James. She moves into an outbuilding/pottery studio but soon leaves for an artists' community in Taos. Eventually, three of the children marry and follow respectable careers, all living near the family home occupied by their father until his death. Bill leaves the house to the children, stipulating that if they sell, they need approval of one other sibling and Penny. Then James, still the rude impetuous problem child and sporadically in touch over the years, shows up needing money. The resulting conflict stirs up heart-wrenching memories and resentments. VERDICT Packer offers a flawless, compassionate portrayal of each family member at both their best and worst and shows what a strong hold the past has on the present. Literary fiction at its finest; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/13/14.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Palisade, CO (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.