The Children's Crusade jumps around in time and point-of-view — not in a needlessly confounding way, but as a way to intensify another one of its themes: that the four Blair children — like all children — each came fully loaded at birth with their own idiosyncratic temperaments. The oldest, Robert, is, from the get-go, an overachiever; he becomes a doctor like his father, albeit a depressed one. Rebecca, the lone daughter, is a psychiatrist — a profession she started practicing (without a license) as an adolescent, closely observing her parents; Ryan the third and most endearing child is, we're told, distinguished by "a quality of sweet lively tenderness"; as an adult he returns to his crunchy private school to be a beloved teacher. That leaves odd-man-out youngest child, James: the narcissistic ne'er do well he turns into as an adult was prefigured by the raging id he was as a child, never getting enough of his mother's attention. In fact, the title of the novel derives from a scheme all four of the Blair children hatch to woo their mother, Penny, away from the solitude she craves over their company.
Even as it delves into the Blair family dynamics, Packer's novel also gracefully nods to how the tenor of the changing decades shapes the behavior of parents and children alike: for instance, Penny finds a political cover story to validate her long festering alienation from husband, kids and kitchen when Second Wave Feminism comes along and gives her the language — if not, perhaps, the correct diagnosis — of her feelings. (She and Bill were never compatible; she was probably the type of person who would have been happier — or just as unhappy — on her own.)
The Children's Crusade is a big heavily plotted family saga to dive into and savor: deftly written, at times, funny, and always psychologically astute. It's a mark of just how nuanced Packer's characters are that, by story's end, you'll probably find you've switched your allegiances to each of them at least twice.
Read an excerpt of The Children's Crusade