The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer

I usually avoid domestic fiction, unless it is satirical, but something drew me into this novel. It begins with a short chapter describing the war history of the patriarch, a physician serving on a war ship during world war 2 and his courtship of the inscrutable woman who becomes the mother of his four children.  Although not highly literary, the novel held my interest as the mother becomes more distant from her family, eventually abandoning them to become an artist.  In the children's attempt to please their mother and keep her close, they decide to hold a crusade, trying to come up with a family event that would give her pleasure.  Their juvenile (they are children after all) never comes to fruition.  This indeed imitates life as so often our best attempts to love someone becomes interrupted by distraction and the minor events of our own lives.  The Millions described the novel as like a Franzen novel, but with likeable characters, which is such an absurd statement I had to mention it here.  Who needs to like any character in a novel?  We just have to feel for them and learn to understand what motivates their actions.  Later chapters are narrated from the point of view of each adult child, and here Packer is successful.  Each character has a unique voice and their childhood viewed from the adult perspective is illuminating.  The resolution and acceptance of their mother's abandonment is a little too pat, but all in all the novel is a "good read" while not being hugely demanding.