The Children's Crusade: A Novel - Softcover

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.