Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt

Synopsis:

This is a fiction book about a ten-year-old girl named Winnie Foster. She is from a wealthy family and lives in the small town of Treegap in the late 1800s. Her family is overbearing, and Winnie things about running away.

One night while Winnie is outside catching fireflies, she sees a man in a yellow suit who is looking for information about the Tuck family. Also, Winnie, the man, and her grandmother hear a music box playing in the woods near Winnie’s home.

The next morning, Winnie is in the woods exploring, and sees a young man named Jesse Tuck drink from a spring. He first tells her is 104, then says he is seventeen. Winnie tries to drink from the spring but Jesse stops her. Jesse’s mother Mae and brother arrive and take Winnie to their house because they are afraid she will tell her family about the spring.

The Tucks tell Winnie that after they drank from the spring none of them aged and that the spring made them immortal. Angus, the patriarch of the family, wants to grow older but cannot. He asks Winnie to keep the spring a secret because if people know about it, they will want to drink from it and become immortal. Jesse wants Winnie to wait until she is seventeen and drink from the spring and live forever with him.

The man in the yellow suit steals the Tucks’ horse and rides to the Fosters’ home. He tells them that the Tucks have kidnapped Winnie and promises to rescue her in exchange for their woods. He arrives at the Tucks’ house and tells the Tucks that he knows their secret and plans to sell the spring water. Mae uses Angus’s gun and hits him on the head.

Winnie tells the constable that the Tucks are her friends and that they did not kidnap her. Mae is locked in the village jail and Winnie helps her escape. The Tucks have all left. In 1950, Mae and Angus return to Treegap and find Winnie’s grave saying that she died when she was seventy-eight and was married with grandchildren.

Review:

I love this book and the themes of immortality and the meaning of life and love the character of Winnie and the whole Tuck family.

“Dying’s part of the wheel, right next to being born. You can’t pick the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing.”

“Life’s got to be lived, no matter how long or short.” You got to take what comes. We just go along, like everybody else, one day at a time.”

“You don’t have to live forever you just have to live.”

“Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping.” The frogs are part of it, and the bugs, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is.”