Tuck Everlasting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Author | Natalie Babbitt |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Children's book, Fantasy |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) |
| Released | 1975 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 144 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-374-48009-5 |
Tuck Everlasting is a children's book by Natalie Babbitt published in 1975. The book explores the concept of immortality, and the reasons why it might not be as beneficial as it appears at first glance for its audience.
[edit] Story
The novel, set in 1800, has ten-year-old Winifred "Winnie" Foster as its protagonist. She comes from a well-bred, straitlaced family and becomes lost in the woods one day during an attempt to escape her smothered and suffocating lifestyle. In the woods, she encounters the Tucks, an enigmatic family living deep in the woods that her family owns.
The Tuck family, comprised of Angus Tuck, Mae Tuck, and their two children, 22/109-year-old Miles and 17/104-year-old Jesse, have a dangerous secret. Young Winnie stumbles across it when she meets them: they are immortal. Frightened by this, she gets scared, but the Tucks kidnap her and take her back to their home. They gained their immortality by accident when they drank from a small spring in the woods as they were building their settlement in the woods. The first signs that they could not die were when Jesse fell from a tree without a single scrape; their horse which had also drunk from the spring took a bullet and still lived; and other various incidents to the family members that should have normally been injurious or fatal. Gradually, they began to suspect that something was wrong when twenty years passed and they still looked the same age. Their neighbors, thinking that they had made a pact with the Devil, began moving away from them, and the woman that Miles had married left him. To prevent people from finding out the source of their immortality, they made an agreement to isolate themselves from all other people; Winnie is the first person since then who has discovered them.
Living with the Tucks, Winnie begins to get used to their laid-back, easygoing way of life. She also develops a romantic attachment to Jesse, the Tucks' youngest son, who attempts to persuade Winnie to join them by drinking from the spring. Jesse's father, Angus, however, warns her against it, explaining that it disrupts the natural cycle of life because humans were intended to be born, grow up, and then die, instead of living forever and never getting a reprieve. He even says that he wants to "live again" as a changing human and not be mired in time like the rocks along the river, presenting Winnie with a moral conundrum.
Winnie's idyllic life with the Tucks is suddenly disrupted when the Tucks are discovered by a man wearing a yellow suit who she saw near the gate of her house at the beginning of the novel. The man reveals that he had been searching for a family that could never die, described by an apparently senile old woman, who turned out to be Miles' former wife. Learning that Winnie had run away into the woods, he used this information to obtain the Fosters' land claim to this part of the woods in exchange for Winnie's return.
The man in the yellow suit blackmails the Fosters, telling them that if they give him the Wood that The Spring is in, (which the Fosters own,) he will tell them where their beloved daughter Winnie is and help them rescue her. The man demands that the Tucks show them where the spring is, while trying to hold Winnie hostage, but they instead assault him, giving him a whack on the head that proves to be just fatal, as the police come to the scene, seeing Mae hit the man and sentencing her to death. Winnie and the Tuck family go to rescue her at the last minute.
Winnie is reunited with her family, but learns that the Tucks are in jail for murder and are planning to be hanged, which would reveal their secret. She secretly helps them to escape to another town until talk of them has died down. Jesse wants Winnie to run away with them, but she declines for fear that her family would persecute them, and he instead gives her a bottle of water from the spring to drink before they come back to get her.
A few days afterwards, Winnie finds a toad fleeing from a predator. She decides to give the toad the water in the bottle Jesse gave her instead of using it on herself.
Years pass, until the Tuck family finally returns to pick up Winnie. However, they learn that she chose not to drink the water after all, dying at the age of seventy-eight. As they drive away, a toad hops into the road. Angus stops his carriage and moves it off the road, commenting that it probably thinks that it will live forever…
A movie has been made based on this book.
