Ann Packer - The Children's Crusade.epub

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.


PRAISE
"In The Children’s Crusade, Ann Packer flawlessly executes the most daring, difficult and exhilarating feat in the novelist's repertoire: to re-create the history of an era and a place through the history of one family, finding intimacy in the sweep of time and import in the nuance of everyday life, pulling it off with mastery, authority and all the passionate artistry that lovers of her work have come to expect."
-– Michael Chabon, author of Telegraph Avenue

"Do our childhood experiences determine our destinies? In shimmering prose and with exceptional wisdom, Ann Packer examines the life of a California family, laying bare the relationships between brother and sister, parent and child, while at the same time revealing the ways in which the past casts both shadow and light on the present. The Children’s Crusade is a provocative, dazzling novel from a world-class fiction writer."
– Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train

"The Children's Crusade is an extraordinary tale of a physician, his wife and their four children. Set in Northern California, it is a coming-of-age tale of family as well as an American pastoral; the language is beautiful, painterly, even as it shows us how much of our adult identity has been fully formed in childhood. Ann Packer’s eye for detail, her genius at evoking an era with such faithfulness, and her mastery of story make us identify with and deeply care for her characters. This is a beautiful novel that will stay with me."
– Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

"Told in the most elegant prose... extraordinarily compassionate... A masterful portrait of indelible family bonds."
– Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist (starred review)

"Well-crafted… Packer is anaccomplished storyteller whose characters are as real as you might find aroundyour dinner table. Readers will be taken with this vibrant novel."
– Publishers Weekly

"Packer is an expert at complicated relationships… Beautifully precise… 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."
– Kirkus (starred review)

"A tour de force family drama… An engrossing saga… Packer brilliantly constructs the siblings’ narratives with both an appealing lightness and an arresting gravitas… Packer’s golden touch makes us care deeply for this memorable tribe."
– Lisa Shea, Elle

"An artful portrait of a California family."
– Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

"A flawless, compassionate portrayal... literary fiction at its finest."
– Donna Bettencourt, Library Journal (starred review)

"Tender, absorbing... Packer has great compassion for her characters, with their ancient injuries, their blundering desires. The way she tangles their perspectives perfectly, painfully captures the tumult of selves within a family. "
– Catherine Newman