Happy Monday Everyone! Today I’m excited to be part of Claudia Mills’ blog tour to celebrate the release of the paperback version of her MG, The Last Apple Tree. It sounds like a fantastic contemporary story about friendship, family secrets, and grief, and I’m looking forward to reading it.
Here’s a blurb from the publisher:
Twelve-year-old Sonnet’s
family has just moved across the country to live with her grandfather after her
nana dies. Gramps’s once-impressive apple orchard has been razed for a housing
development, with only one heirloom tree left. Sonnet doesn’t want to think
about how Gramps and his tree are both growing old—she just wants everything to
be okay.
Sonnet is not okay with
her neighbor, Zeke, a boy her age who gets on her bad side and stays there when
he tries to choose her grandpa to interview for an oral history assignment.
Zeke irks Sonnet with his prying questions, bringing out the sad side of Gramps
she’d rather not see. Meanwhile, Sonnet joins the Green Club at school and
without talking to Zeke about it, she asks his activist father to speak at the
Arbor Day assembly—a collision of worlds that Zeke wanted more than anything to
avoid.
But when the interviews uncover a buried tragedy that concerns Sonnet’s mother, and an emergency forces Sonnet and Zeke to cooperate again, Sonnet learns not just to accept Zeke as he is, but also that sometimes forgetting isn’t the solution—even when remembering seems harder.
Now the guest post written and sponsored by Claudia Mills!
The
Haunting Pain of Family Secrets
I grew up in a house filled with secrets – or at least haunted by things never spoken about.
It was years before I learned that the man who sometimes came to visit was actually my much older half-brother from my father’s first marriage that ended in divorce. My mother plainly wanted to pretend that first marriage had never happened. More painfully, in those days when gravely disabled children were often institutionalized, my younger brother who had Down’s Syndrome was sent away when I started elementary school and never mentioned again. Only after my mother’s death did my sister and I discover that he was still living. His very existence was also something we were supposed to pretend had never happened.
From these experiences I learned that the only thing more painful than talking about difficult subjects is not talking about them.
The Last Apple Tree
In my recent book The Last Apple Tree, classmates Sonnet and Zeke are (unwillingly) paired together to interview her recently widowed grandfather for a seventh-grade oral history project. Their teacher gives them a list of possible questions: e.g., did your family have a car? What holidays did you celebrate? What games did you play when you were young? Sonnet is determined to stick to safe questions only – certainly nothing about Nana that might make Gramps start to cry. She tells her little sister, “You and I have to try to make Gramps happy. Or at least happier. That’s the most important thing for both of us.” And if they can’t do that, at least they can try never to make Gramps feel sad.
Zeke, however, finds the assigned topics boring and asks probing follow-up questions that lead into dangerous territory, all connected with the old man’s beloved apple tree, lone survivor of a vanished orchard. It’s where he proposed to his wife, beneath its branches. It’s where he grieved the destruction of the orchard’s other trees when the land was sold for a housing development. And it’s where a tragedy occurred decades ago, never spoken of since, but one that left deep scars on the tree – and on Sonnet’s family.
Now, when I began writing The Last Apple Tree, the initial inspiration was an article I read about the Boulder Apple Tree Project, sponsored by the University of Colorado, which was created to locate and preserve one-of-a-kind heirloom apple trees in the county, as well as the stories connected with them. So I decided to write about an heirloom apple tree, the old man who loved it, and the two kids who would learn its stories in the course of their school oral-history project. I also knew that to provide a compelling plot for young readers, at least one of the stories would need to involve the revelation of some long-hidden secret. I didn’t yet know what the secret would be, just that I had to come up with one! And when I did, the secret ended up involving a family tragedy: the death of Sonnet’s mother’s twin sister at a very young age in a fall from one of the tree’s branches. A tragedy that was never spoken of again. A tragedy that Gramps and Nana had decided to pretend had never happened.
Unwittingly, I was writing the story of my own childhood all over again.
I realized how much Sonnet’s desperate desire to avoid any painful conversations that might aggravate her grandfather’s grief for his dead wife was exactly like my family’s avoidance of any mention of my father’s first marriage and of the little brother I never saw again. Avoidance of pain at any cost was the operative principle. The best way to avoid pain was never again to talk about the source of the pain.
Why We Need Not to Silence Painful
Stories
Here is what Sonnet – and her mother and her grandfather – learn about this failed strategy for pain avoidance as the story comes to its close. Whenever I write a book, the truths about human life and experience I impart to young readers are not only ones I wish I had learned when I was a child; they are ones I am still working on understanding and acting on now.
So what do they learn?
1. It’s okay to be sad. It’s part of being human to be sad. Sonnet’s little sister creates an imaginary country called Happy Land. But at the end of the story, Sonnet tells Villie, “Even in Happy Land, people need to be sad sometimes.”
2. Emotions that aren’t outwardly expressed don’t disappear. Driven inward, they continue to be an ache in the heart that never gets a chance to heal. Sonnet’s mother, who has repressed all conscious memory of the incident that led to her twin’s death, leaves home as soon as she can and avoids returning. When Sonnet asks why they saw so little of Gramps and Nana, her mother isn’t sure how to answer: “I don’t know . . . there was just something sad about this house.”
3. Repressed emotions take a toll on interpersonal relationships. Sonnet’s mother’s perception of the sadness of her childhood home led to near estrangement from the parents who loved her – and who avoided the painful conversations only in a futile effort to protect her.
4.
Perhaps
most significantly, when we don’t know the true story behind traumatic events,
the human need to make meaning out of our experiences drives us to make up
alternative – false – stories of our own. The silence surrounding her twin’s
death led Sonnet’s mother to believe that the tragedy somehow had to be her
fault: “I must have done something bad, something so unforgiveable” that all
evidence of her sister was taken away. She carried a hidden load of guilt until
the day that Sonnet and Zeke discover the true account of what happened on that
terrible day: an accident when an already cracked branch breaks entirely.
“The
truth shall make you free.”
I hope that young readers of The
Last Apple Tree, and the adults who share the book with them, will feel
inspired to start sharing previously untold family stories – funny ones,
touching ones, exciting ones, and yes, and perhaps especially, sad ones, too.
Zeke’s father quotes this famous line of scripture to his son: “And ye shall
know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Stories – true stories –
can help us understand ourselves and each other better. I do believe they can
free us to lay down burdens we should never have been carrying in the first
place.
Thanks for sharing all your advice,
Claudia. You can find Claudia at https://www.claudiamillsauthor.com/
About Claudia: Claudia Mills is
the author of over 60 books for young readers, including most recently the
verse novel The Lost Language and the middle-grade novel The Last Apple Tree,
as well as two chapter-book series: Franklin School Friends and After-School
Superstars. Her books have been named Notable Books of the Year by the American
Library Association and Best Books of the Year by the Bank Street College of
Education; they have been translated into half a dozen languages. Claudia is
also a professor emerita of philosophy at the University of Colorado and a
faculty member in the graduate programs in children’s literature at Hollins
University. She has written all her books in her faithful hour-a-day system
while drinking Swiss Miss hot chocolate.
TOUR SCHEDULE
Giveaway Details
Enter for a chance to win one of ten signed paperback copies of The
Last Apple Tree by Claudia Mills. But wait, there’s more! One lucky
grand prize winner will get a special one-hour Zoom author visit with Claudia
herself, plus signed copies of The Lost Language and a book
from her wonderful chapter book series.
Marvelous Middle Grade Monday is hosted by Greg Pattridge. You can find the participating blogs on his blog.
Upcoming Interviews, Guest Posts, and Blog Hops
Monday, October 27th, I have an interview with author Dusti Bowling and a giveaway of her MG Holding on for Dear Life
Wednesday, October 29th I have an agent spotlight interview with Renee Runge and a query critique giveaway
Saturday, November 1st, I’m participating in the Thanks a Latte Giveaway Hop
Wednesday, November 5th, I have an interview with Pamela N. Harris and a giveaway of her YA Through Our Teeth and my IWSG post
Monday, November 10th, I have a guest post by Darlene P. Compos and a giveaway of her MG The Center of the Earth
Wednesday, November 12th, I have an agent spotlight interview with Mara Cobb and a query critique giveaway
Sunday, November 16th, I’m participating in the In All Things Give Thanks Giveaway Hop
Monday, November 17th, I have a guest post by Mike Steel and a giveaway of his MG Not Lucille
Wednesday, November 19th, I have an agent spotlight interview with Carter Hasegawa and a query critique giveaway
Monday, November 24th, I have a guest post by R.M. Romero and a giveaway of her MG The Tear Collector
I hope to see you on Monday!
