Rating: 2/5
The Tuck family have eternal life. They drank from a magical spring in a forest which nobody knows about – not even the owners of the forest, the Fosters – and are doomed to remain at the age they were when they drank from the spring for eternity.
Winifred Foster, nearly-eleven-year-old daughter of the owners of the wood, comes across a curious, very handsome young boy drinking from a spring in her forest. It’s Jesse Tuck, aged seventeen, who is going to stay seventeen for the rest of forever.
Mae Tuck, the mother of two sons, Jesse and Miles, has come to find her sons like she always does every ten years. She comes across Jesse, who is persistently refusing that Winnie Foster does not drink from the spring because, well, it’s dirty water. Overcome with terror and shock, Mae hurriedly takes Winnie to their barn-like, messy, chaotic house. Mae tells Winnie of their story, and pleads and begs that she does not cry, because they will take her back first thing tomorrow, when she knows why not to tell anyone about the spring.
Angus Tuck, known throughout the family simply as ‘Tuck’, tells Winnie why she shouldn’t tell anyone. “They’ll all come running like pigs to slops,” he says. “Please, Winnie, please – you can’t tell anyone else. Anyone else at all.”
But perhaps someone already knows…
I thought the book was simply “ok”. I thought that the plot was excellent, but the way that Babbitt wrote it was not. I was on the verge of crying at the end (***SPOILER ALERT!***) because of this: Jesse gives Winnie a bottle of water from the spring, and tells her that when she turns seventeen, to drink it and come find him, and they can marry and live together and be young for eternity. But seventy years later, when Mae and Tuck come back to the forest, it has all been chopped down. Fearing the worst, they go to the cemetery, where a grave stone reads: “In loving memory of Winifred Foster Jackson, dear wife, dear mother, 1870-1948”. She did not drink it. And Jesse still waits for her.