Download The Children's Crusade: A Novel AudioBook Free
From New York Times best-selling, award-winning writer of The Dive From Clausen's Pier, a sweeping, masterful new novel that explores the secrets and needs, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family over the course of five decades. Expenses Blair finds the land unintentionally - three wooded acres in a rustic community south of SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA. The entire year is 1954, a long time before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a perspective of the family he has yet to create, Bill buys the house over a whim. In Cent Greenway he finds a suitable wife, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life seems convincing and answerable, and they marry and also have four children. Yet Cent is a mercurial housewife at a time when women chafed at the conventions enforced on them. She finds salvation in fine art, however the cost is high. Thirty years later the three oldest Blair children, people now but still living near the house, are disrupted by the go back of the youngest, whose rapid occurrence and all-too-familiar troubles pressure a reckoning with who they are, independently and along, and set off a struggle in the family's future. One at a time the siblings take converts telling the storyplot - Robert, a doctor like their daddy; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; Ryan, a schoolteacher; and Adam, the malcontent, the situation child, the only person who hasn't resolved down - their narratives interwoven with portraits of the family at critical tips in their record. Reviewers have praised Ann Packer's "brilliant ear for persona" (The New York Times Booklet Review), her "naturalist's vigilance for aspect, so that her heroes seem observed rather than invented" (The New Yorker), and the "utterly lifelike quality of her book's each day aspect" (The New York Times). Her abilities are on amazing display in The Children's Crusade, an extraordinary study in persona, a uncommon and wise study of the legacy of early life on mature children wanting to create successful people and identities of their own. That is Ann Packer's most deeply influencing book yet.
