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Our Price: $5.95
Product Details
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| Shipping Weight: |
0.50 |
| Author(s): |
Natalie Babbitt |
| Vendor: |
BAKER & TAYLOR |
| Publisher: |
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) |
| Published: |
01 November, 1985 |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0374480095 |
| Store Code: |
2825 |
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Description: Imagine coming upon a fountain of youth in a forest. To live forever--isn't that everyone's ideal? For the Tuck family, eternal life is a reality, but their reaction to their fate is surprising. Award winner Natalie Babbitt (Knee-Knock Rise, The Search for Delicious) outdoes herself in this sensitive, moving adventure in which 10-year-old Winnie Foster is kidnapped, finds herself helping a murderer out of jail, and is eventually offered the ultimate gift--but doesn't know whether to accept it. 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. Intense and powerful, exciting and poignant, Tuck Everlasting will last forever--in the reader's imagination. An ALA Notable Book. (Ages 9 to 12) --Emilie Coulter
Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Magic; Immortality; Classics; Juvenile Fiction; Children's Books/Ages 9-12 Fiction; Social Issues - General; Children: Grades 4-6; Secrets; Juvenile Fiction / General; Aging; Fantasy; Fiction;
Average Review: 4 stars
Review: An exceptionally well-written advertisement for Stockholm Syndrome : As a budding children's author, I've had this book recommended to me time and again. I knew just the broad strokes of the story (young girl finds family with eternal life), but I wasn't quite prepared for the way the plot unfolded. The protagonist, an 11-year-old, who has been kidnapped, is charmed by the family and their burdensome secret, and infatuated with their ostensibly 17-year-old son (creepily, it's mutual). A sympathetic character commits murder to protect a family secret, and the main character is concerned only with saving the woman from the gallows (which would lead not to her death, but to revelation). The villain, the Man in the Yellow Suit, is painted so one-dimensionally as a moustache-twirling baddie that it's supposed to be okay that Mae Tuck killed him. In less than 24 hours, a girl goes from wishing for adventure to defending a murderer, all because she was, as the author so frequently reminds us, bored. All I could think of as the book concluded was Stockholm Syndrome, the phenomenon in which a kidnap victim comes to sympathize with his or her abductors. This book, for all its reputation, doesn't just send a bad message, it sends several. There is great storytelling prowess here, but at its heart is a main character with no conscience.
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