45 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine ApplegateWishtree
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | 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.
Symbols & Motifs
(Anti) Fairy Tale
Applegate reminds her young audience throughout the narrative that this story is not a fairy tale. It’s a fair assertion, as she populates the story with talking animals. Applegate’s repeated assertion, then, may seem tongue-in-cheek, but it is also apt. Applegate wishes for the story to function not as fantasy but as a parable of contemporary American issues. Samar’s struggle with Islamophobic harassment is something very real and pressing—not at all fairy tale fodder. And Applegate’s message about loving and accepting cultural difference is an unabashedly political one, and an intervention against the increasing cultural and racial polarization of contemporary American life. She therefore has different characters emphasize the reality of the story in order to ground it gently in real American cultural, historical, and political context—and to enjoin her reader to apply its lessons to real life. An active approach to real-life issues will ensure that individuals don’t fall victim to thinking people make up or exaggerate pressing issues like fairy tales.
Red’s Hollows
Red has three hollows inside of their trunk as a result of adversity. Two formed as a result of the incursions of woodpeckers, and the other formed after they lost one of their branches in a storm. Eventually, these wounds healed into hollows. For Red, “hollows are proof that something bad can become something good with enough time and care and hope” (25). They use their hollows to shelter the lovable animal families, and they also importantly used their hollow to shelter Francesca’s great-grandmother Amadora. The hollows therefore function as a symbol for human adversity. Applegate forms a thematic message through her symbolic depiction of these hollows. She asserts that, if a human being has the strength to heal their wounds, then they can use those wounds as a source of strength and wisdom.
Ultimately, it is Maeve’s example of taking Amadora from Red’s sheltering hollow and raising her as her own, despite their physical and genealogical differences, that intervenes against the present-day bigotry that Samar and her family suffer within the community. This process mirrors that of Red’s process with their hollows: Something that originally wounded and posed adversity changed into something beautiful through the strength, persistence, healing power, and resilience of love.
The Silver Key
Bongo gifts Samar, her preferred human, with a silver key in the initial stages of the narrative. When Francesca later sees this key hanging from a ribbon around Samar’s neck, she recognizes it as the key to Maeve’s old diary. Maeve is Francesca’s great-great-grandmother, and the diary contains the story of Amadora and the wishtree. When Francesca reads and remembers this story, it deeply moves her, and she changes her plan to cut down Red. She remembers that Red is much more than a tree, and much more than the sum of the absurdity of some of the wishes that people tie to Red’s branches. Through the backstory unlocked by the silver key, Francesca remembers that it was the kindness and love of her great-great-grandmother, and Maeve’s choice to shelter an innocent and abandoned baby despite that baby’s differences from herself, to which she owes her own life and presence in the community.
The silver key symbolizes at least two distinct ideas. The first is that humans too hastily forget the lessons that their ancestors’ lives bore out. Sometimes, they need assistance from nature, which is older and often wiser, to remind them of lessons that were learned through the struggles of their forbears. The second idea is that children have the power to surpass adults in their wisdom. Samar’s innocent and earnest guardianship of a gift from Bongo is ultimately the watershed action that helps Francesca to overcome her own blindness.
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By Katherine Applegate
