Up Island is that part of Martha’s Vineyard where the year-round residents live. It is hard to get to in the best of times, and is downright inhospitable in the winter. It is also where Atlantan Coca-Cola “company-wife” Molly Redwine is healed after her husband leaves her for a younger woman and her difficult mother dies. Up Island, the novel, is difficult to read at times, and if you can get past the first third, which reads too much like many other husband leaves good woman for younger women books, you’ll find healing magic for yourself. 

Of the many books written by this author that I have read, my favorite until now was Outer Banks – I am a sucker for stories about college-aged women and their lives thereafter. Each of her books in the past several years is named for a locale – from the Hill Towns of Tuscany to the Colony of Maine to the Fault Lines of California to the Downtown of Atlanta. In each of these far-flung places, her protagonist learns about herself and is able to move to a new phase in her life. Up Island is my new favorite by this author, by a hair.

In Up Island, Molly Redwine is a Coca-Cola wife in this Coca-Cola town. Her daughter is married, her son is graduating high school, and she’s just discovered her wealthy husband is leaving her for a younger woman, a Coca-Cola lawyer who looks as tall, lithe, and exotic as she did in her younger days. Molly finds herself lost after her husband leaves, and when her mother dies after a particularly painful phone call, takes her Yankee friend Livvy up on her offer to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard.

While Siddons’ writing of this part of the story is well-done, it seemed a bit contrived – nearly every woman’s fiction piece I’ve read in the past ten years features an infidelity scenario, which is one of the reasons I first ventured into the romance genre. Still, she does it better than most – the characters, from Molly’s Southern friends, to her mother-in-law, to her self-absorbed brother, are well-drawn, and the story moves ahead at a crisp pace.

When Molly arrives on the Vineyard, however, the story seems to come alive. The Vineyard itself seems a living entity as the author lovingly describes it, and when Molly discovers that part of the island the summer residents rarely see, both she and the reader become fascinated by it. So when she decides to stay up island as the caretaker to two swans and an angry one-legged man, it makes sense.

This is where all the good stuff happens. Isolated from her family and friends, Molly begins a new life. She invites her father, devastated after the death of her mother, to come and stay with her in her small cottage, and they, along with her dog, interact with that one-legged man, his mother, and her cousin (from both of whom he is estranged), in ways which no one could have expected.

This is one of the oddest collections of humanity you are likely to come across, and it is a testament to the author’s skills that the reader will come to care about anyone save Molly, her father, and the dog. Each inhabitant in Molly’s new little world is badly damaged, and it takes each of them, in their angry, pathetic, and injured ways, to come together and take care of one another.

Anne Rivers Siddons has created an endearing group of misfits in Up Island, and this odd little “family” will leave the reader feeling hope and joy, which is quite an accomplishment for a location and personalities which could easily have created feelings of isolation and despair. This is a difficult book in terms of content, but one that is ultimately inspiring.