Hmmm...I'm kind of stuck on this one. The Children's Book is a weighty tome, and it is not as lightly skipped through as Bonfire of the Vanities. It's an epic of a tale without the adventure, following a generation of liberal young children growing up in the late 1800s, and following them into the Great War. Relationships are complex and detailed, the characters are many, and not always likeable. The lead Matriach, Olive, writes novels for all of her children, which reveal dark secrets of her feelings as a mother and artist. The families move in a privileged but forward thinking world, they try to address the everyday scandals of society, as well as push their art to the limits. The relationship problems they face are multitudinous in our modern society, and it's interesting to see that the artistic and privileged classes were the ones who opened the floodgates to many of the morals issues that tend to plague the lower classes in today's society.

To write a novel with such complexities of characters was quite an achievement. Olive turns out to be a pretty difficult character to like in the end, though her children generally fare better. I didn't dislike this book by any means, but I wasn't absolutely taken with it either. It'd be a 3.5 if Goodreads allowed such a thing. The ending manages to be powerful and rather trite at the same time. There is very little joy in the book - good things do happen, but they don't feel celebrated. It's a little detached, and I don't really know how I feel about it.