The Last Apple Tree
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 18 Jun 2024
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- €11.99
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- Pre-Order
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
When feuding neighbors Sonnet and Zeke are paired up for a class project, they unearth a secret that could uproot Sonnet’s family—or allow it to finally heal and grow.
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.
Award-winning author Claudia Mills brings enormous compassion and depth to this novel of unlikely friendship and generational memory.
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mills (The Lost Language) centers characters navigating personal changes against a potent backdrop of tree conservation in this emotionally authentic novel. Until recently, seventh grader Zeke has been homeschooled by his idealistic vegan parents, who don't allow him anything "normal," such as a cellphone, video games, or television. Indiana newcomer Sonnet, also in seventh grade, arrives from Colorado with her poet mother and lively, imaginative five-year-old sister to live with her widowed grandfather. Gramps is struggling without his soulmate, to whom he proposed in the apple orchard he had to sell, which became the subdivision where Zeke lives. Only one aging apple tree—the focal point of past events and of the narrative's well-constructed momentum—remains. When Zeke and Sonnet interview Gramps for an oral history project, Zeke inadvertently derails Sonnet's mission to keep Gramps's grief at bay, and unearths a buried family tragedy. Meanwhile, Sonnet's participation in the school's Green Club threatens to reveal Zeke's "weirdo" father's environmental activism. Moving, interspersed poems, though extraneous to the plot, pay homage to a motif of trees' capacity to feel. All characters read as white. Ages 9–12.
