Wander Home

Eleanor has spent her life wandering and forever searching for an elusive  something.She even leaves her two-year-old daughter with her parents and grandmother as she goes off to find what keeps pushing at her. She is devastated when she discovers her grandmother, mother, father and daughter have been killed in a car accident. Then at age 29 Eleanor suffers what appears to be a heart attack. She finds herself pain-free and in familiar surroundings. Her grandmother is there to explain how things work in this afterlife and then she is reunited with her mother, father and daughter. However, the feeling of peace she was expecting doesn’t come and she’s having strange dreams of a man she’s never met. Eleanor needs to figure out this mystery before it tears her family apart once again.

Well-written, with well-developed characters and a richly described world, this unique take on the afterlife is incredibly interesting. After a bit of a slow beginning the reader will become fully engaged in the discovery of Eleanor’s mystery.  Watching Eleanor and her family trying to untangle the pieces and decipher her dreams gives one a sense of urgency - as though Eleanor’s whole existence is in peril even though the afterlife is supposed to be trouble-free. The reason behind the mystery is surprising and it poses the hard-to answer question to the reader: What would you do if that happened to you?  A thought-provoking, complex and artful read.

Carol Conley