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?