Eleanor’s Wars
Ames Sheldon’s remarkably assured debut novel Eleanor’s War takes place in 1940s New Jersey and provides the reader with a fascinating view of the Second World War from the home front stage.
Sheldon’s main character, Eleanor Sutton, is the strong-willed and multi-faceted matriarch of her family. But as Sheldon’s carefully complicated narrative unfolds, the pressures of the war raging in Europe infiltrate even into Eleanor’s family – and not just the current war: both Eleanor and her husband, George, carry different kinds of secrets stemming from the First World War.
Sheldon takes us into the lives of the Sutton children as well, each of whom begins dealing with their own dramas and secrets. Although Sheldon crafts all the Sutton stories with great skill and dramatic pacing, I found the younger son Nat’s conflicts at boarding school the most compelling. The novel is a steadily-deepening web of secrets and revelations, something that kept me reading intently right to the last page.
