Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Since she was once a homeless orphan, Eleanor's chaotic, joyous family and farm mean everything to her. And then....How much pain and loss can one person take? How can you end up evicted from a world you built yourself? How can doing the right thing backfire totally? In her 10th novel, Maynard vividly imagines a scenario that answers these questions with hard-won wisdom, patiently leading her protagonist and her readers through the valley of bitterness and isolation to what lies on the other side. When she is just 16, Eleanor's alcoholic, self-involved parents are killed in a car crash. At boarding school, she comforts herself by creating picture books about an orphan who travels the world; these sell to a publisher, and by the time she's a sophomore in college, she has enough money to drop out, drive into the countryside, and buy a farm. "It looked like a house where people who loved each other had lived," she thinks. If you build it, they will comeright? Nonetheless, several years go by in solitude, and not without additional tragedy. At last, she meets Cam, the handsome, redheaded woodworker who will give her three children they both adore. But even as Eleanor revels in motherhood with every cell of her being, her glue gun, and her pie pan, she knows fate cannot be trusted. "If anything really terrible ever happened to one of our children, I couldn't survive," she tells her husband. Could loving her children too much be her downfall? she worries. When an accident that her husband could have prevented changes their lives, she will find out. She will find out how, in your grief, you can drive away the people you love most. And she will find out, slowly, what you can do about that. The novel bites off a lota Brett Kavanaughinspired storyline, a domestic abuse situation, a trans child, Eleanor's careerand manages to resolve them all, in some cases a bit hastily.Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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Maynard (Under the Influence) shows her mastery at pulling the heartstrings in her latest family saga. Doled out in 100 bite-size chapters, the life of a woman named Eleanor unfolds over five decades starting with her solitary childhood in Newton, Mass., where she felt like an intrusion on her narcissistic, often inebriated parents, whose drunken behavior of shouting matches and thrown glasses Eleanor characterizes as trips to “Crazyland.” The author reports on Eleanor’s lonely teen years and fragile emotional state that was exacerbated by her parents’ deaths in a car accident, and later her financial independence after she sells a children’s book series. Other milestones—buying a ramshackle house in New Hampshire, meeting the love of her life, and having three children—give way to the dissolution of her marriage after their four-year-old son almost drowns while being unsupervised. Granted, the many side plots start to feel contrived once they’re added up (a minor character’s death from AIDS, another’s dementia, a #MeToo scenario, and a close friend’s refusal to leave an abusive husband, to name a few), but Maynard does a good job of developing Eleanor, making the perspective she gains over the course of her life feel fully earned. Despite the melodrama, Maynard succeeds at pulling in the reader. (May)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Since she was once a homeless orphan, Eleanor's chaotic, joyous family and farm mean everything to her. And then.... How much pain and loss can one person take? How can you end up evicted from a world you built yourself? How can doing the right thing backfire totally? In her 10th novel, Maynard vividly imagines a scenario that answers these questions with hard-won wisdom, patiently leading her protagonist and her readers through the valley of bitterness and isolation to what lies on the other side. When she is just 16, Eleanor's alcoholic, self-involved parents are killed in a car crash. At boarding school, she comforts herself by creating picture books about an orphan who travels the world; these sell to a publisher, and by the time she's a sophomore in college, she has enough money to drop out, drive into the countryside, and buy a farm. "It looked like a house where people who loved each other had lived," she thinks. If you build it, they will come—right? Nonetheless, several years go by in solitude, and not without additional tragedy. At last, she meets Cam, the handsome, redheaded woodworker who will give her three children they both adore. But even as Eleanor revels in motherhood with every cell of her being, her glue gun, and her pie pan, she knows fate cannot be trusted. "If anything really terrible ever happened to one of our children, I couldn't survive," she tells her husband. Could loving her children too much be her downfall? she worries. When an accident that her husband could have prevented changes their lives, she will find out. She will find out how, in your grief, you can drive away the people you love most. And she will find out, slowly, what you can do about that. The novel bites off a lot—a Brett Kavanaugh–inspired storyline, a domestic abuse situation, a trans child, Eleanor's career—and manages to resolve them all, in some cases a bit hastily. Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

What Eleanor, orphaned at 15, wants most are a home and family. In 1973, only 20 and already the author and illustrator of a popular children’s book series, Eleanor buys a used Toyota and hits the road. In rural New Hampshire, she buys a long-abandoned farmhouse shaded by a mighty ash with a bubbling brook and waterfall nearby. A few years later, she has a husband, craftsman Cam, and three children. Eleanor builds a bucolic life that includes an annual spring ritual of making cork people and setting them in paper boats afloat on the fast-flowing stream. The family races along the banks, watching the progress of their creations. Some cork people make it through a dark culvert, and others don’t, a poignant embodiment of Eleanor’s biggest fear, that she might lose one of her children. Maynard (Under the Influence, 2016) portrays Eleanor, her family, and their precious home through three tumultuous American decades, setting their story amidst seminal events and to a soundtrack featuring the music of each era. Sensitively plumbing the complexity of human emotions, of love and forgiveness, she draws readers into a deep, aching attachment to her characters, creating an ultimately hopeful tale just right for this moment.