by Jay Moody

Created on: May 22, 2008   Last Updated: March 19, 2010

A remarkable and engaging children's book can often be difficult to find. Parents looking for a book with a great story and a strong moral would do well to get their child a copy of "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein. This short book has had a profound impact on many children since it was published in 1964. It deals with the relationship between a boy and his favorite tree as they grow through the years.

The boy loves the tree and the tree loves the boy. He spends his youthful days climbing her trunk, swinging from her branches and sitting in her shade, eating the apples she happily provides for him. The illustrations clearly show a heart engraved in her trunk in which the words Me + T can be read. The tree was happy. But eventually as the boy grows older he comes to visit her less and less often.

Then one day after the boy has grown up he comes to the tree and tells her that he can no longer play the way they used to because he was too big and wanted money. Without any money to offer the boy, the tree happily gives him all of her apples to sell which the boy gladly takes and does not return for quite a while.

Years later when the boy returns he is a grown man and explains that he wants a house to start a family. Concerned only with the boy's happiness the tree freely gives of her branches for him to build it. The boy leaves the tree with only a trunk. At this point in the story a reader cannot help but feel a strong sense of sympathy for the tree and wonder how a child will ever be able to swing in her branches again.

Eventually the boy uses every part of the tree, leaving only a stump. When the boy finally returns years later he is an old man and needs only a place to sit and the tree, with nothing else left to offer gives of herself one final time as a resting place for the elderly man who was once the boy that swung in her branches.

"The Giving Tree" is a story that reaches out beyond childhood and finds deeper meaning as the readers become adults. The story has been used by educators to teach messages of self-sacrifice, and unconditional love. Many people have found a not so subtle environmental message contained between the covers of this wonderful book. By the end the reader is left with a sense of remorse for the destruction of the tree, but joy in knowing that in the end it is as it was in the beginning. The boy, now elderly sits with his old friend in the twilight years of his life and the tree is happy.

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