The Paradise Problem

Anna is the book’s female protagonist. She is tall and beautiful, with pink hair and dark eyes. She was raised by her father, David, and she works multiple jobs to help pay the bills he incurs for his ongoing cancer treatments. Her mother, a lawyer who never reconciled herself to the limitations of her husband’s blue-collar job, left when Anna was five. Anna acknowledges the damaging effects of her mother’s abandonment, for this early trauma influenced her initial choice of a major in college. As she states, “Even as a kid I absorbed the sense that [David’s occupation] was a job, not a career, and that there was a value difference there, [...] but I was still trying to make myself lovable to [my mother]” (111). For this reason, she tried studying medicine before focusing on art instead. Anna knows that her mother’s value system influences her own responses to the decadence she sees on the private island, and she is appalled at her own enjoyment of the luxuries on offer. Her parents’ contrasting influence is evident in the things that Anna ultimately values, and her inner struggle emphasizes The Tension Between Romantic and Familial Loyalty as she ultimately places a higher value on her own ethics than on the siren song of material comforts.