In Treegap, a small village of rural America in the 1880's, ten-year-old Winnie Foster, wanting to make a difference in the world and contemplating running away from the ever-watchful eyes of her mother and grandmother, happens upon a strange young man drinking from a spring in the woods on her family's land. When Winnie informs the young man, that she is thirsty and would like a drink from the spring, he earnestly informs her that the water would not be good for her to drink.
Thus begins the story of Tuck Everlasting. Winnie discovers that the Tuck family had drunk from the spring eighty-seven years before, and since that time had remained ageless and immortal. Trying desperately to convince Winnie that she must not share the secret of the spring with anyone, the Tucks, Jesse, his brother Miles, and their mother Mae, kidnap Winnie and take her to their disheveled house to meet their father and husband, Angus Tuck. Angus, who often dreams of being in heaven with his family, tells Winnie of the futility of immortality saying, "You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road."
The story is complicated by the appearance of a stranger, a man in a yellow suit, who hears the Tuck's tell Winnie about the spring in the woods, Jesse's offer of marriage to Winnie if she will just wait and drink some of the water when she is seventeen, and a murder that carries with it the penalty of death on the gallows. What Winnie chooses at the end is not what she might have chosen at first; knowing the Tucks has forever altered her life.
Natalie Babbitt weaves a fantasy tale taut with suspense and bursting with human emotion and drama. Through her use of dialect, Babbitt acquaints readers with the Tucks, uneducated, yet possessing untold wisdom. The unabridged audio version of Tuck Everlasting, read by Peter Thomas, a familiar voice on both radio and television, immediately captures listeners, as Thomas adopts a variety of voices for the characters. Tuck Everlasting, a book appealing to both children and adults, is sure to provoke much thought and discussion on the value of life and the importance of aging and death in that perpetual cycle.
Babbitt, Natalie. 1975. Tuck everlasting. Read by Peter Thomas. 1995. New York:
Random House, Inc. ISBN: 0807275530.
