Up Island
by Anne Rivers Siddons
List Price: $6.99
Pages: 512
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 006109921X
Publisher: HarperCollins
It takes a severe rash on Molly Redwine's rear end to make
her realize Tee, her husband of over twenty years and the father of her
two children, is having an affair. As the wife of a valued and high ranking
employee of Coca-Cola, the company that dominates Atlanta's industry,
Molly enjoys all of the benefits accorded to her. She has a lovely home
in the high-rent district of Ansley Park, membership in the exclusive
Driving Club, and key positions in all the best charities in town, and
most importantly, she has her family. But when Tee announces that he plans
to marry his new lover, a successful and ambitious Coca-Cola lawyer, Molly
stands to lose everything. When her domineering mother suddenly dies,
and her children scatter across the country, and her Atlanta crowd slowly
and subtly close ranks around Tee, Molly finds herself completely adrift.
Devastated by her crumbling world, she takes refuge with her friend, Livvy,
on Martha's Vineyard to recuperate and come to terms with her new loss.
When the summer season ends, Molly decides to stay on, and takes a cottage
on a remote, up island pond. In lieu of rent, she tends a pair of cantankerous
swans and delivers food to their owners, an elderly and infirm pair of
cousins. Molly finds her caretaking duties extended to include Dennis,
the recently arrived young cancer patient living next door, and then her
own grieving father, who comes to visit for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
As Molly's stay up island widens the distance between her and her old
life in Atlanta, she lets go of her outworn notions of family and becomes
part of a strange, but very real, new family. As the long and brutal Vineyard
winter closes in, Molly braces herself for the search for renewal and
the strength to forge a new life for herself.
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1. What role do the swans, Charles and Di, play in the lives of each of their human caretakers? What do they represent for Luzia, Bella, Tim and Molly,
respectively? And what do they give back to the humans in return for food? Why do you think Tim and Luzia are able to communicate with the swans
better than anyone else? What is the significance of the fact that they are a rare breed of mute swans?
2. When Molly's mother dies, her ghost begins visiting, first Molly, and then Tim, in their dreams.
What is Belle's ghost trying to say to them? What does she want? And does she get it? What does Belle's hat mean to Molly when she first arrives
on Martha's Vineyard? What does the hat come to mean for Molly?
3. What kind of understanding of "family" did Molly inherit from her Mother? Did it change when Molly
had a family of her own? How does her up island experience change her notions of family, and in what ways? How might her new understanding help
her cope with loss and her husband's betrayal?
4. Livvy says to Molly, "that's what middle age is, one loss after another . . . Didn't
anybody ever tell you?" All of the people in Molly's Vineyard "family," her father, Dennis, Bella, Luzia, and herself, suffer from one or more
devastating losses. How do they each cope differently with their losses? What enables each of them to ultimately find renewal and hope?
5. Molly muses that her son Teddy was not losing his father from the divorce, "only I was
losing. From the perfect skin of The Family, only I was being ejected. How could that be?" How does her separation and potential divorce from
Tee irrevocably alter her relationships with her children, friends, and parents as well? How is it that only she "was losing?" And does that still
hold true by the end of the novel?
6. Molly agrees to stay in the small up island cottage on the condition that she is not required
to become emotionally involved with the Ponders and their mysterious quarrels and struggles. What is it that draws her into the lives of her wards?
When does Dennis Ponder cease being an abstract cancer patient and become "real" in her eyes? What kind of relationship do Dennis and Molly arrive
at by the end of the novel? How would you characterize it?
7. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." What is the significance
of Thoreau's passage for Tim, Dennis and Molly?
Courtesy of HarperCollins, Inc.
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