54 pages • 1 hour read
Robin BenwayFar From the Tree
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Family and Belonging
While all three main characters in Far from the Tree deal with issues surrounding family, love, and trauma, Benway uses each character's story and unique struggles to craft a clear theme. In the case of the youngest sibling, Benway uses Maya’s adoption story and internal struggles to address the idea that a person may not always feel like they belong in their family, even if that family is picture-perfect from the outside looking in.
When Maya was younger, a classmate reminded her that her younger sister Lauren is “biological” while Maya isn’t. Years later, Maya still thinks about this passing comment and wonders if she doesn’t belong in the family that adopted her. Her family’s home is full of family photos in which Maya stands out in sharp contrast to the rest of their family, and she jokes that looking at her family portraits is like playing a game of “one of these things is not like the other” (54). Although Maya’s parents did everything they should to normalize Maya’s adoption and show their love, their efforts backfired. After seeing how her parents “read all these books about adoption, and adopted kids, and how to accept and love your adopted child,” Maya realizes that she has “never seen them read a single book about their biological kid” (222), which makes Maya feel like she is more difficult to raise than her sister.
Maya seeks connection anywhere she can outside of her family. She admits that she feels more at home with Claire than in her own household, especially because Claire is such a peaceful presence in contrast to the shouting voices of her parents. Maya’s parents have constantly been fighting for most of her life, and amid their battles, Maya feels a pressing need to “put herself in between them, to see which one of them would tug her closer. To know if either of them would fight to keep her after trying so hard fifteen years ago to get her” (120). Even amid conflict, Maya is trying to feel some sense of belonging in her own family, and she wants to know that she is still loved and wanted and seen as a family member.
In the end, Maya learns that families will always be imperfect, and feeling out of place in her family doesn’t mean that she doesn’t belong. She tells Joaquin that “sometimes, family hurts each other,” but then they “bandage each other up, and [they] move on” (335). The pain in Maya’s household might have caused her to look for a family elsewhere, but her heart will always be with the people who chose to have her in their lives. Maya can feel a sense of belonging in many places at once, and she finds peace knowing that family extends beyond the walls of a house.
Sacrifice and Unconditional Love
As the teen mother of the story, Grace connects to her birth mother on a spiritual level. Before Grace gave birth to her daughter, she “hadn’t really given her biological mom much thought, but now this strange woman kept dominating her mind” (181). For Grace, finding her birth mother isn’t just about pursuing a fleeting curiosity or discovering her roots: Grace wants to find the only person that she thinks will understand what she is going through. Benway uses the intertwining stories of Grace and Melissa to explore the depths of sacrificial love and what it means to make tough decisions in the name of love.
When Grace finds out she is pregnant, she is ashamed. As a teenager, Grace knows that she can’t raise a baby, and as the “first person [...] Peach would ever need,” Grace feels like she is “already letting Peach down” (5) by putting her up for adoption. As the months wear on, however, Grace bonds with her unborn baby, and when she has to hand Peach over at the hospital, Grace is distraught. One moment she is holding her daughter, and then “she [is] gone, riding away with strangers, someone else’s daughter and lost to Grace forever” (9). Grace knows that this is the best decision she can make for her daughter, but because she loves her on a deep, primal level, the separation rips her apart emotionally. Grace says that “there’s this space where [Peach] used to be and now [Grace] can’t fill it, and [she] keep[s] trying, but [she’s] walking around with this hole inside [her]” (300-01).
Grace becomes very defensive about her decision to give Peach up for adoption. She doesn’t want to tell Maya or Joaquin about it because she is afraid they will think Grace abandoned her daughter just like their mother abandoned them. The word “abandoned” is so emotionally charged in this situation that Grace hesitates to use it as freely as Maya. Grace starts to realize that if her birth mother went through anything like what Grace is going through, then the decision was gut-wrenchingly hard and not deserving of shame or disgust. She tells Maya and Joaquin that she loves Peach so much that she “would never just abandon her” (300), despite what they might think. When Maya and Joaquin see Grace falling apart at the memory of giving up her daughter, they are suddenly led to question their judgment of their birth mother. Grace’s pain may be intense, but this pain reflects her love for Peach. Daniel and Catalina point out that although Milly is their baby girl, “she was once [Grace’s], too” (152), and the bond of love between mother and child is strange, complicated, and not easily severed. Grace will always love Peach, just like her elusive mother loved her and her siblings despite their doubts.
The Impact of Trauma on Relationships
Of the three siblings in Far from the Tree, Joaquin is the character who carries the most trauma from his childhood. Unlike his sisters, who had (relatively) stable homes and adoptive parents that cared for them, Joaquin spent his entire childhood in foster care and has lived with 18 different families over his 17 years. Benway uses Joaquin to demonstrate how childhood trauma can alter a person’s ability to form meaningful, long-lasting relationships and to point out the power of therapy when it comes to healing from this trauma.
Joaquin has dealt with abusive situations during his time in foster care, and more than one of his foster parents used physical violence against him as a child. However, Joaquin points out that “words [can] shatter harder than a glass breaking against a wall, hurt more than a fist plowing through teeth” (18), and during his time in foster care, Joaquin was told time and time again that he is “too much and not enough” (81). Not only has Joaquin given up on the prospect of ever being adopted, but he also pushes away other people and self-isolates. Because of Joaquin’s history of being shuffled from house to house and his violent outbursts at the age 12, Joaquin thinks that he is too dangerous to get close to anyone. In his mind, he is protecting the people he loves by pushing them away from him, but in the process, Joaquin is not allowing himself to experience forgiveness or acceptance.
Thankfully, Joaquin is surrounded by people who do not allow him to push them away without a fight. When Joaquin breaks up with Birdie, she calls him out and says he is running away because he is scared of being loved and accepted. His therapist warns him not to run away from his sisters “like [he] did from Birdie because [he] think[s] [he’s] not good enough for them” (131), and even though he is afraid that he might “pull them down from the sky and out of their perfect elliptical orbit, throwing everything off-balance” (75), Joaquin continues to spend time with his siblings until he finally breaks down and shares the deepest secrets of his past trauma with them.
Mark and Linda make it very clear to Joaquin that they are not the Buchanans and won’t send him away or stop loving him, even when he tries to make them angry. When Joaquin sees Mark and Linda looking for him at the end of Chapter 27, he realizes that no one has ever come after him like this, and he is overwhelmed with emotion. He apologizes to them for his behavior, and when they welcome him back with open arms, he thinks that “this must be what forgiveness [feels] like, pain and hurt and relief all balled up together, pressing against his heart so that it might burst” (355). Joaquin realizes that if other people can forgive him, then he can forgive himself and begin the path to healing.
