Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbitt
 Ten-year-old Winnie comes from a well-bred and straight-laced family who keeps her safe behind a four-foot iron fence that surrounds their home. She lives a life of boredom and frustration. They are the oldest family in the town and own the surrounding woods. When she runs away from her confinement and into the woods one morning, she finds a beautiful tree from which a spring of water pours with a teenage boy—almost a young man—drinking from it. This discovery leads her to learn of the Tuck family - the boy named Jesse Tuck and the rest of his family (Jesse's mother Mae Tuck, father Angus Tuck, and brother Miles)—who are immortal (they do not age and cannot be killed by most normal fatal accidents or methods of killing; it was never clear whether they would survive) because they drank from this spring eighty-seven years earlier. The family decides it best to take Winnie away with them to explain the secret and why it must be kept—but all the while, a man in a yellow suit has been watching. He has come to the town in hopes of finding the spring (which he had heard of through stories told by his grandmother who is Miles Tuck's wife's friend) and selling the water for an incredibly high price. He uses this supposed kidnapping of Winnie to define the Tucks as brutes, and uses it to persuade the Fosters to give him the forest. Meanwhile, the Tucks introduce Winnie to their strange limbo existence, and she grows to love them like the family and friends she never really had. They are affectionate, with nearly no apparent rules, and live humbly in the woods 20 miles from town. They state that unleashing immortality upon the world would disrupt the balance of life, throwing human beings out of the great cycle of life and death and turning them into "rocks on the side of the road." Their brief time together is ended when the man in the yellow suit confronts the family, whom he has tracked to their home after the "abduction." After hearing his plan, Mae Tuck takes out a shotgun and hits him in the back of his head with the stock, a blow from which he eventually dies. The constable, who has followed the man, sees only Mae's assault, not the man in the suit's plans to use the Tucks as sideshow freaks. Mae is incarcerated in the newly built jail and will be hanged, but since she cannot die, her date with the gallows will reveal the Tucks' secret to the world. Jesse then gives Winnie a bottle of the spring water, and tells her to drink it when she turns 17, as he has asked her to live and travel the world with him, or even get married. Jesse argues that immortality is only dreadful for the Tucks because the way in which they live makes it so; he says that they could be together, in the prime of their lives, forever. Meeting the family by the jailhouse the night before Mae's "execution," the boys open the jail's bars, and Winnie takes the place of Mae in the cell. They then escape, while Winnie is found in the cell the next day. She gets into trouble for helping the Tucks escape, but the secret is safe. In the epilogue, it is revealed that Winnie had a family of her own after the Tucks' escape. Winnie died of old age before the Tucks came back to Treegap for her. The Tucks were saddened, yet they left to live their immortal lives.