This memoir describes the emotional pain of growing up fatherless and reveals God’s amazing love at work to heal childhood hurts, even through circumstances of rejection.

When author Maria Martinez was just three years old, she heard the word illegitimate for the fi rst time. Though she was too young to understanding its meaning as it applied to her, she knew it made her feel different and ashamed.

In The Apple Tree Wish, Martinez discusses her life’s events being branded an illegitimate child. She also shows the healing and wholeness she received through Christ’s love and reconciliation with her father later in life.

A two-part presentation, the first half delivers a transcript of a talk Martinez gave for a women’s group in 1992. In it, she narrates the events leading up to meeting her father in 1985, when she was forty-five years old. The second half contains a journal of the letters she wrote to and later shared with her father. In the journal she provides pertinent details of her life and shares her many emotions as she dealt with her unique situation.

The Apple Tree Wish shows the emotional scars created by being a fatherless child, but also communicates that God’s love has the power to heal the classic types of childhood hurts.