![]() But once I got started it was easy–partly because of the setting, which is a real place. There were a couple of other beginnings that aren’t around anymore, because there were so many piles of paper that I finally gave everything to the University of Connecticut. About the story’s creation Babbitt said, “It was hard to find the right way to begin it. Eventually the reader learns that Winnie has embraced her mortality and affirmed her humanity, her place on the wheel, by choosing to become ‘Winnie Foster Jackson, Dear Wife, Dear Mother’.”īack in 2000 Betsy Hearne interviewed Natalie Babbitt in the March/April 2000 issue of Horn Book about the book for its 25th Anniversary. Winnie in her turn must act to save Mae, whom she loves, and to protect the secret, which she is not sure she believes. While the act resembles the swift justice of a folktale, it has complicated consequences. When this evil person threatens to use the secret to acquire wealth and power for himself and to use Winnie as a freak, after he forces her to drink the water, Mae Tuck kills him in an act of violent retribution. The Tucks realize that their secret has cosmic implications, that it must be guarded from the villainous ‘man-in-the-yellow-suit’ at all costs. They learn that immortality without growth, change, or death is an infernal paradise–a curse, not a blessing. When she finally ventures into the woods, she is kidnapped by the Tuck family, who have innocently drunk from the fountain of youth with pernicious results. The plot from American Writers for Children Since 1960: Fiction reads, “The heroine of Tuck Everlasting, Winnie Foster, is an overprotected child who inhabits a no nonsense house guarded by ‘a capable iron fence.’ Unaware that the spring of eternal life quite literally bubbles in the nearby wood, Winnie has lived in the protected oasis of her home for ten years. Here was a book that brought up an issue that humanity has grappled with since the dawn of time. Yet even as I lamented the lack of a joyous finale as well as the fate of the poor eternal toad at the end (the true victim of the book, in my eyes) I was fascinated with this story. And unhappy children’s literature? Every time I met an ambiguous ending or one that didn’t ascribe to my strict sense of how-a-story-should-end ( Stuart Little stands out in the mind) I was perturbed. Life was to be tied up in a neat little bow, thank you very much. Happy endings were far preferable to unhappy. I was a sensitive child, which is to say, a wimp. I did not think that I liked Tuck Everlasting when I was a kid. – Kristi HazelriggĪ beautiful story about mortality. Intense and powerful, exciting and poignant, Tuck Everlasting will last forever–in the reader’s imagination. To live forever–isn’t that everyone’s ideal? Babbitt asks profound questions about the meaning of life and death, and leaves the reader with a greater appreciation for the perfect cycle of nature. Imagine coming upon a fountain of youth in a forest. #16 Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt (1975) ![]()
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