Eleanor

Eleanor is the central character of the novel. Maynard uses Eleanor’s life experiences to illustrate the way a person can survive tragedies in life and emerge as a better person. Even though Eleanor works hard to be a good mother to her children and to give them a different childhood from the one she experienced, she is the one ejected from the family when she and her husband divorce. Eleanor resents Cam. However, she comes to a point in her life, after Cam’s second wife leaves him for a younger woman, that she is able to forgive him.

Eleanor did not have a loving family as a child. Thus, her goal as an adult was to make a family. As a twenty-year-old with a book contract, she bought a small farmhouse that looked like a place where happy people lived. She believed the family she wanted...