There was something strange about the wood.
The first house only is important the first house, the road, and the wood. But the village doesn't matter, except for the jailhouse and the gallows. On the left stood the first house, a square and solid cottage with a touch-me-not appearance, surrounded by grass cut painfully to the quick and enclosed by a capable iron fence some four feet high which clearly said, "Move on-we don't want you here." So the road went humbly by and made its way, past cottages more and more frequent but less and less forbidding, into the village. And all at once the sun was uncomfortably hot, the dust oppressive, and the meager grass along its edges somewhat ragged and forlorn. It became, instead, and rather abruptly, the property of people.
On the other side of the wood, the sense of easiness dissolved. But on reaching the shadows of the first trees, it veered sharply, swung out in a wide arc as if, for the first time, it had reason to think where it was going, and passed around. And then it went on again and came at last to the wood. It widened and seemed to pause, suggesting tranquil bovine picnics: slow chewing and thoughtful contemplation of the infinite. It wandered along in curves and easy angles, swayed off and up in a pleasant tangent to the top of a small hill, ambled down again between fringes of bee-hung clover, and then cut sidewise across a meadow. Its enduring meaning to readers nearly half a century later makes the case that children can and even yearn to grapple with darkness-that, indeed, denying their very real, very universal fears is far more frightening.The road that led to Treegap had been trod out long before by a herd of cows who were, to say the least, relaxed.
While its lessons hinge on its central fantastical element, its themes are grounded in some of the heaviest elements of reality people of all ages must confront. Babbitt’s book won numerous awards, was adapted into two movies and a Broadway musical and translated into 27 languages. Saddled with a secret she must help to conceal as outsiders seek to profit off of the powerful elixir, Winnie learns that it is the fact of life’s ending that gives meaning to all that comes before. In it, young Winnie Foster comes to know a family, the Tucks, who have been granted the seemingly enviable but actually burdensome miracle of immortality after unknowingly drinking from a magical spring in the further reaches of her family’s property. The girl was afraid of dying, so Babbitt wrote a story for young readers that faced death head-on. Natalie Babbitt got the idea for her now-classic 1975 novel, Tuck Everlasting, from her four-year-old daughter.
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