Far From the Tree

Content Warning: This section includes discussion of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and childhood trauma.

The first section of the novel (Chapters 1-27) is titled “Falling.” Sixteen-year-old Grace planned to spend her homecoming dance with her friends and Max, “her boyfriend of just over a year” (3). However, she ends up giving birth to her daughter on homecoming night. Grace found out she was pregnant during her second trimester, and by then, her baby was as big as a peach, so Grace started calling her unborn baby “Peach.” She knows she can’t keep the baby because “Peach would need Grace in ways that she couldn’t give to her” (5). Grace and her parents give the baby up for adoption, and she chooses a couple named Catalina and Daniel. Grace forms an attachment to Peach, especially as she becomes more isolated at school and at home. Peach is born “right when Max [is] being crowned homecoming king” (8).

Catalina and Daniel offer to keep the adoption open so Grace can see Peach, whom they have named Milly, but Grace “[doesn’t] trust herself” to “not [take] her back” (9). After Peach leaves with her new parents, Grace tells her parents that she “want[s] to find [her] birth mother” (10).