The Last Apple Tree

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. (June)