Cavite State University - Carmona Campus
Carmona, Cavite

Book Review
HUMN 6

Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbit

Romero, Maria Lourdes N.
BS Business Management 4

Ms. Sherry Rose Luya

February 2012

Table of Contents

Page

Sypnosis 3

Summary 3

The Most Favorite Part 4

5 Sentences/Phrases 4

The Things Learned from the Book 5

Recommendation 5

Sypnosis

This story is a fantasy about a family named Tuck who accidentally stumble upon a spring in a wood, which has the ability to give eternal life. They don’t realize at first what they have drunk until they realize that their bodies are not aging and they cannot be hurt or harmed in any way. They travel quietly around the countryside; never staying in one place too long so that people will not realize their secret. Into this family comes Winnie Foster, a little girl in search of freedom. She learns their secret and falls in love with them so deeply that she will do anything to protect them. The family and Winnie then must face a villain who would steal their secret for himself.

Summary

A ten year old Winnie comes from a well-bred and strait-laced family who keep her safe behind a four-foot iron fence that surrounds their home. She lives a life of boredom and frustration. They are the oldest family in the town, and own the surrounding woods. When running away from her confinement and into the woods one morning, she finds a beautiful tree from which a spring of water pours, with a teenage boy - almost a young man - drinking from it. This discovery leads her to learn of the Tuck family - the boy named Jesse Tuck and the rest of his family (Jesse's mother Mae Tuck, father Angus Tuck, and brother Miles) - who are immortal (they do not age and cannot be killed by most normal fatal accidents or methods of killing; it was never clear whether they would survive, for example, being dropped into a blast furnace) because they drank from this spring eighty-seven years earlier. The family decides it best to take Winnie away with them to explain the secret and why it must be kept - but all the while, a man in a yellow suit has been watching. He has come to the town in hopes of finding the spring (which he had heard of through stories told by his grandmother) and selling the water for an incredibly high price. He uses this supposed kidnapping of Winnie to define the Tucks as brutes, and uses it to persuade the Fosters to give him the forest.

Meanwhile, the Tucks introduce Winnie to their strange limbo existence and she grows to love them like the family and friends she never truly had. They are affectionate, with nearly no apparent rules, and live humbly in the woods 20 miles from town. They state that unleashing immortality upon the world would disrupt the balance of life, throwing human beings out of the great cycle of life and death and turning them into "rocks on the side of the road." Their brief time together is ended when the man in the yellow suit confronts the family, whom he has tracked to their home after the "abduction." After hearing his plan, Mae Tuck takes out a shotgun and hits him in the back of his head with the stock, from which blow he eventually dies. The constable, who has followed the man, sees only Mae's assault, not the man in the suit's plans to use the Tucks as sideshow freaks. Mae is incarcerated in the newly built jail and will be hanged, but since she cannot die, her date with the gallows will reveal the Tucks' secret to the world. Jesse then gives Winnie a bottle of the spring water, and tells her to drink it when she turns 17, as he has asked her to live and travel the world with him, or even get married. Jesse argues that immortality is only dreadful for the Tucks because the way in which they live makes it so; he says that they could be together, in the prime of their lives, forever. Meeting the family by the jailhouse the night before Mae's "execution," the boys open the jail's bars and Winnie takes the place of Mae in the cell. They then escape, while Winnie is found in the cell the next day. She gets into trouble for helping the Tucks escape, but the secret is safe.

In the epilogue, it is revealed that Winnie has died two years before Angus and Mae Tuck returned to the town in the 1950s seeking to find her. It is revealed that Winnie had married and had a family of her own. The Tucks also discover that Foster Forest had been destroyed by a fire caused by a lightning strike, after which the area was bulldozed. All of this either destroyed the spring or rendered it inaccessible. So the Tucks carry on.

The Most Favorite Part

When a young girl Winnie stumbles upon the fountion of youth. Along with this discovery she meet and comes to love the Tuck family. When she is offered the chance to live forever she has a tough choice to make.

5 Senetences/Phrases

1. “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.”pg. 3 -theme of the story and the motif of the wheel.

2. “Fixed points they are (hubs), and best left undisturbed, for without them, nothing holds together. But sometimes people find this out too late.”pg. 4 -life is like a wheel.

3. “ I was having that dream again, the good one where we're all in heaven and never heard of Treegap”p9 -belief of heaven and hell.

4. “You can't have living without dying.”p64 -there is the existence of Life so that there is Death.

3. “Durn fool thing must think it’s going to live forever, ‘ he said to Mae.” pg. 139 -nobody lives forever.

The Things Learned from the Book

I was truly moved by this book because I believe some of us should be more permanent than others. In my opinion, the Tuck family just doesn't know what to do with all that time they have. They're too boring to have everlasting life. The novel ultimately puts up an argument for mortality, and why it is necessary, by using the Tucks as a counterexample.

In short, this is a sad book about what happens when people lack ambition and common sense. The main characters mean well but they have bad attitudes. We can learn from their mistakes. Its about Life and Death.

Recommendation

The story is original, clever, and inspired. It's actually one of my favorite books. It's about a girl named Winnie Foster who discovers a family of immortals. Throughout the story, she has to hide their secret. Unfortunately, a man in a yellow suit wants to share their secret with the world. Winnie is also a really good role model because she risks being caught to save a friend and instead of using the everlasting water on herself, she uses it on a toad (one of her best friends), knowing that living forever isn't really a good thing. The ending is sad, though, because the Tucks find out Winnie has passed away. But anyways, it was a great book and I highly recommend it.

I recommend this book for older children who are ready to contemplate the issues of life and death, but who can still appreciate fantasy. But I also highly recommend it to adults. It just might help you consider the magic of life that adults so often dismiss as childish impossibility.