For fans of Jean Stone’s Vineyard novels, there’s good news. While her engrossing Vineyard series drew to a close with “A Vineyard Season,” she has launched a new one with “Up-Island Harbor.”
Stone has changed location, shifting us up-Island compared to the Vineyard series’ focus on Chappy and Edgartown. However, rest assured she has built the same sense of community with a tight-knit group of characters who interact, weaving in and out of each other’s lives. A couple of the characters from the Vineyard series also show up here, including a love interest, so there is a satisfying sense of continuity.
Our protagonist in the new book is Maddie Clarke. We meet her as a five-year-old with skinny legs running down the hill to the ice cream shack in Menemsha. She’s been bribed with the treat by her beloved Grandma Nancy, who has a small, gray-shingled cottage where Maddie’s mother grew up.
It turns out that this memory from four decades earlier is coming to Maddie because she just received a letter that her Grandma Nancy has died at 89, and she is now heir to the estate. Maddie is stunned by the news. She hadn’t seen her grandmother since her mother’s funeral when she was still five. At ten years old, though, when Maddie wanted to go back to visit Grandma Nancy in the Vineyard, her father replied that having been old and feeble, she had died. Stone writes, “She was too young to realize that, realistically, her grandmother would have still been too young to typically become feeble and die.”
As fond as Maddie’s memories are of her summers in Menemsha, she only wants to quickly sell the cottage and return home to her son and father. Likewise, she is anxiously awaiting news about whether she will receive tenure at her Massachusetts college.
‘We make plans, and God laughs’ might be the novel’s throughline. Maddie gets injured on the dunes, making it impossible to leave immediately. Likewise, all sorts of mysteries keep cropping up, starting with the nature of Grandma Nancy’s death, which holds up the sale. Of course, there is also the lingering question of why Maddie’s father lied about Nancy’s death all those years ago.
Clearing out the cottage in preparation for its eventual sale, Maddie discovers a long-buried family secret: Grandma Nancy was Wampanoag. The revelation upends Maddie’s perception of who she is and complicates her relationship with her father, the Island, and some of the people she befriends.
If all this is not enough, at the end of many chapters, there is an unnerving anonymous person observing Maddie from afar. The first time we hear them think: Maddie Clarke, after all, would be too busy to realize that someone was spying on her, hoping she’d reveal how things were going to play out.
Spying — or today’s word, ‘stalking’ — was not very nice, but sometimes you did things you did not always like when you’d made a promise . . . no matter how long ago.
Later, determining whether to snoop around the cottage to see what Maddie is planning, the anonymous voice says, “Unless she’s left the Island . . . in which case, all this would have been a total waste.” What “this” is remains out of reach until we get one of Stone’s quintessential surprise endings.
Corresponding with Stone through email, I asked why she chose to set the new series in Menemsha. “It just seemed to feel like another perfect place for the kind of characters I love to create. And I think it provides them with more in-depth exposure to Island life than seasonal characters often have at the more bustling locations.”
Asked why she decided to make her protagonist part Wampanoag, Stone replied, “Because I love to learn, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to weave facts about and anecdotes of the tribal heritage throughout the plot and to hopefully let my readers feel a part of the interaction among everyone.”
She continues, “‘Up-Island Harbor” is about people. People of all sorts who come together with a common love: Martha’s Vineyard, people like the washashores and those whose families have lived here for a generation — or a few centuries. And people like the indigenous Wampanoags, who are proud to say, that after ten thousand years, they’re still here. For which I think we are very fortunate.”
“Up-Island Harbor” by Jean Stone. Kensington Publishing, $17.95. Available at Edgartown Books and Bunch of Grapes.
