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Tuck Everlasting

Natalie Babbitt, 1975

Fantasy Young adultLiterary fictionContemporary fiction

A girl discovers a family who will never grow old, and must decide what forever is worth. A slim fable about time, choice and the cost of staying the same.

Feels like wonder, melancholy and hope. About morality, time and nature.

A page from the book

What it means to be one turn of a wheel that never stops.

Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is.
Excerpt from Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt 1975. Quoted for discovery. Source Rights & removals

Natalie Babbitt.Tuck Everlasting was a 1976 Newbery Honor Book and has stayed in print for half a century, though Babbitt is also known for her illustrations in dozens of children's books.

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Questions readers ask

What is Tuck Everlasting like?
Feels like wonder, melancholy and hope. About morality, time and nature.
What should I read after Tuck Everlasting?
If you liked Tuck Everlasting, try A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle), One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (Shel Silverstein).

A taste of the feed

  1. The moment a familiar body becomes something no myth has a name for.

    The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than the outward description. Outwardly Mrs. Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs. Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen.

    A Wrinkle in Time · Madeleine L'Engle

  2. The moment you realise time isn’t passing but turning in circles.

    —Qué quería —murmuró—, el tiempo pasa. —Así es,—dijo Úrsula—, pero no tanto. Al decirlo, tuvo conciencia de estar dando la misma réplica que recibió del coronel Aureliano Buendía en su celda de sentenciado, y una vez más se estremeció con la comprobación de que el tiempo no pasaba, como ella lo acababa de admitir, sino que daba vueltas en redondo.

    One Hundred Years of Solitude · Gabriel García Márquez

  3. The place past the last streetlight is still waiting for you.

    There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go To the place where the sidewalk ends.

    Where the Sidewalk Ends · Shel Silverstein

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