![]() Rebecca, the lone daughter, is a psychiatrist - a profession she started practicing (without a license) as an adolescent, closely observing her parents. The oldest, Robert, is, from the get-go, an overachiever he becomes a doctor like his father, albeit a depressed one. 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. ![]() As we readers find out, the answer we get depends on whose version of the past we're hearing. Take that opening scene again: As Bill drives into the hills, we're told that he passes through "neighborhoods of brand-new houses that seemed like decoys for something marvelous he would discover soon." That's a nice turn-of-phrase in which to describe, not only the lure of suburbia in the 1950s, but also to introduce the core question of this novel: namely, whether that plot of land and the family that awaited Bill Blair was, indeed, "something marvelous" or just another decoy. ![]() (The novel was subsequently made into a film - the kind that Hollywood used to label a "weepie.") But, Packer's splintered narrative style and the richness of her characters and language illuminate the unexpected depths of the commonplace. ![]() For instance, her debut novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, traced a young woman's guilt over deserting her recently paralyzed fiancé. In summary, her books do sound like mundane mass-market fiction. ![]()
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