Tuck Everlasting: Difference between revisions
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'''''Tuck Everlasting''''' is a [[fantasy]] [[children's literature|children's novel]] 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. In 2002, the book was made into a [[ |
'''''Tuck Everlasting''''' is a [[fantasy]] [[children's literature|children's novel]] 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. In 2002, the book was made into a [[Tuck Everlasting (2002 film)|movie]]. |
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==Story== |
==Story== |
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Revision as of 09:12, 8 December 2007
| Cover of Tuck Everlasting | |
| Author | Natalie Babbitt |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's book, Fantasy |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) |
Publication date | 1975 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 139 p |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-374-48009-5 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
Tuck Everlasting is a fantasy children's novel 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. In 2002, the book was made into a movie.
Story
 | This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. (November 2007) |
In the year 1880, ten-year-old Winifred "Winnie" Foster comes from a well-bred, straight-laced family. She becomes lost in the woods one day in an attempt to escape her smothered, stilted, and suffocating lifestyle. In the woods she encounters the Tucks; an enigmatic family leading isolated lives.
The Tuck family, comprised of Angus Tuck, Mae Tuck, and their two male children, Miles and Jesse. The Tucks possess a dangerous secret: they are immortal and cannot age. When Winnie stumbles upon this fact and becomes frightened, the Tucks kidnap her and take her back to their home. They gradually explain that they gained their immortality by accident eighty seven years ago (1793) after drinking from a small spring in the woods. It became apparent that they could not die when Jesse fell from a tree without a single scrape and their horse, which had also drunk from the spring, took a bullet and still lived. They began to suspect that something was wrong when 20 years passed (1813) and they still appeared to be 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 other people. Winnie is the first person since then to discover them.
Living with the Tucks, Winnie becomes used to their easy going way of life. She also develops a romantic attachment to Jesse, the Tucks' youngest son, who attempts to persuade Winnie to join them when she becomes his age, by drinking from the spring. Jesse's father, Angus, however, warns her against it, explaining that it disrupts the natural cycle of life. He also admits 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. The man reveals that he has been searching for an immortal family that was described by an apparently senile old woman -- who turns out to be Miles' former wife. Learning that Winnie had run away into the woods, he uses this information to obtain the Fosters' land claim to this part of the woods in exchange for Winnie's return. The man demands that the Tucks disclose the location of the spring, but they instead assault him, with Mae dealing him a fatal blow to the head with the end of the gun Angus Tuck shot himself with just as the town constable arrived at the scene. They sentence Mae to death, but Winnie and the Tucks rescue her by replacing Mae with Winnie at the jailhouse.
Winnie is reunited with her family and learns that the Tucks are in jail for murder and the plans are that they are to be hanged, ultimately revealing their secret. She helps them escape to another town. Jesse asks Winnie to run away with them. Winnie declines fearing that her family would persecute them all. Winnie meets him there at midnight. Jesse gives Winnie a bottle of water to drink from the spring, vowing they will return to get her.
A few days later, Winnie finds a toad fleeing from a neighbors dog. Instead of drinking the water herself, she decides to give it to the toad. Many years pass before the Tuck family return to Winnie. On their return they learn, in fact, that Winnie had chosen not to drink the water after all, dying at the age of seventy-eight (1870-1948). As the Tucks are about to move on, a toad hops onto the road. Angus stops his carriage and moves it to the side of the road, commenting that the "Durn fool thing must think it's going to live forever."