Far From the Tree

Maya is a 15-year-old girl and one of the three protagonists in Far from the Tree. Unlike her older sister Grace, Maya was adopted into a family that later had a biological child, so she grew up with her little sister, Lauren. Maya’s parents are wealthy, but behind their picture-perfect house and family photos, their world is falling apart. Maya has never felt like she belongs in her adoptive family, and as she struggles to find her place in the world, Maya aches for emotional security and safety.

Despite her parents’ best efforts to make Maya feel like she is wanted and cherished in the family, Maya feels like “they spen[d] so much time trying to normalize her life that [she] sometimes [feels] like she [is] anything but normal” (21). When Grace and her parents come to visit, they notice how out-of-place Maya looks. In fact, Grace thinks that “Maya look[s] like someone ha[s] dropped her into a life with these three well-dressed, redheaded strangers” (43), and the family portraits lining the stairs don’t help. Maya loves her parents, but she “[doesn’t trust them with her thoughts, not when they [act] like two bulls in a china shop” (24), so she bottles up her emotions until they eventually explode. Maya is “thirteen months older than Lauren, so she [feels] responsible” (17) for dealing with the dark secrets in her home life. As she tries to navigate the waters of her parents’ divorce and her mother’s alcoholism, Maya finds comfort in her girlfriend, Claire, whom she has been dating for several months. Maya adores Claire, and Claire “[feels] like home” (19).

Still, Maya has trouble expressing herself without utilizing humor or sarcasm, and this eventually leads to a rift between her and Claire. Maya tries to hide the ugliness of her life and thoughts from Claire because she is afraid that Claire will leave her. She fears messing up in front of “the one person who she had wanted to be perfect for” (246). Maya winds up pushing Claire away until she can be honest about who she is and how she feels. Maya realizes the importance of vulnerability throughout the novel, and once she learns the importance of opening up to others, her relationships become stronger and deeper. She reconnects with her mom and Lauren, forms new bonds with Grace and Joaquin, and even agrees to go looking for her birth mother despite her initial refusal. After using sarcasm to deflect attention from her pain for years, Maya learns to share her feelings with those around her, and once she feels free to speak her mind, she realizes that she is right where she belongs.

Joaquin is a 17-year-old boy and one of the three protagonists in Far from the Tree. Joaquin is the biological brother of Maya and Grace, but while his sisters were adopted as babies, Joaquin spent the first year of his life with his mother before he was surrendered to foster care. Joaquin was never (successfully) adopted, and he has spent his entire life in the foster care system, ignorant of the fact that he had siblings. After a disastrous adoption attempt when he was 12 and a lifetime of feeling unwanted, Joaquin faces an unexpected challenge: learning to accept love from those who see the goodness in him when he can’t.

At the beginning of the novel, Joaquin is characterized as a deeply lonely character. After his mother surrendered him to foster care, Joaquin wondered if “he had been the worst baby in the world” (28) for his own mother to not want him. This rejection has shaped Joaquin’s self-esteem throughout his life, and after years of failing to find his place in a family, Joaquin has decided to go through life on his own. After all, “Joaquin [...] long ago figured out that if he [doesn’t] expect people to be there, then he [won’t] be disappointed when they [don’t] show up” (35).

Despite this, Joaquin craves approval and affection. He thinks back to the time he won a blue ribbon for his artwork in fourth grade, and even though “there was no one to take a picture of him standing under the blue ribbon” (34), he still “kept it buried at the back of his sock drawer, its edges frayed from the eighteen months that Joaquin had slept with it under his pillow” (35). Joaquin holds tight to this childhood symbol of praise, and it reminds him of a time in his life when he proved himself worthy of attention. Joaquin longs to do good and please the people in his life, but somewhere along the road, he starts to self-sabotage and run away from love before anyone can get too close to him. He tells Grace and Maya that “[he’s] the worst thing that could have happened to [them]” (333), and he breaks up with Birdie because he “loved [her] too much” to “lead her astray” (83-84). Similarly, he decides that he “love[s] Mark and Linda too much to let them adopt him” (226) because he is haunted by the actions of his 12-year-old self, who became violent with his last adoptive family.

When Joaquin finds out that his birth mother wanted him, he is stunned. For the first 17 years of his life, he thought that no one wanted him, but instead, he learns that “someone had once loved him enough to save his pictures for nearly eighteen years” (352) in a safe deposit box. Joaquin soon realizes that it wasn’t just his mother and that he is loved by Mark, Linda, Grace, Maya, and Birdie, and he has more than one family to hold on to. In the end, Joaquin’s journey is rooted in acceptance, love, and learning to forgive yourself as much as anyone else.