Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting: the graphic novel, Adapted and Illustrated by K. Woodman-Maynard (2025)

Natalie Babbitt’s novel Tuck Everlasting is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025, and a graphic novel adapted and illustrated by K. Woodman-Maynard has just been published. Woodman-Maynard did a marvelous 2021 graphic novel adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  

Woodman-Maynard's beautiful watercolor illustrations are a terrific compliment to Babbitt’s story, and they successfully capture the pastoral timelessness of the novel. Woodman-Maynard eschews large blocks of text and often incorporates the narration into the surrounding landscape. This makes for a smoother reading experience, and the narration feels more organic to the book.  

The main character in Tuck Everlasting is 10-year-old Winnie Foster. Winnie lives on the outskirts of a small town named Treegap. Winnie’s parents and grandmother try their best to shelter her from the dangers of the outside world, and she spends most of her summer days within her fenced yard, longing to experience more of what’s on the other side.  

One day, Winnie wanders into the forest near her house. There she sees a handsome young man who is relaxing in the shade of a tree. He drinks from a small spring. Winnie starts talking to him and finds it curious that he does not want her to drink any water from the spring. When the young man’s mother and brother show up, they tell Winnie that they will have to take her with them. 

This strange family that has kidnapped Winnie are the Tucks, and it turns out that they drank water from this spring in the forest many years ago. Since that time, they have stopped aging and are immortal. They have tried to conceal the spring from anyone else, for fear that others would find it and exploit it.  

The villain of the story is the Man in the Yellow Suit, who has been searching for the Tucks for years and has his own nefarious plans for the magical spring. Take a look at the Man in the Yellow Suit’s speech balloons, and you’ll notice that Woodman-Maynard has made the ends of them resemble snakes; to symbolize the way the character tries to seduce whoever he is talking to. It’s such a clever touch.  

Tuck Everlasting is a book that asks difficult questions and doesn’t provide easy answers to its readers. Each member of the Tuck family has a different viewpoint on their accidental immortality. The novel asks us to consider difficult questions: what would it mean to stop aging? What would it be like to be immortal? How would being immortal change the decisions that you made, and the way you lived? How do we come to terms with being mortal? Winnie’s unlikely friendship with the Tuck family forces her to ponder some of these questions.  

Woodman-Maynard's storytelling style is a wonderful fit for this fable-like novel. Her handling of the climax of the book, which uses hardly any words, is a master class in visual storytelling. At the end of the book, there’s an enlightening conversation between Natalie Babbitt’s daughter Lucy Babbitt and Woodman-Maynard, and several pages detailing Woodman-Maynard's artistic process, which is fun to see.  

If you’re a long-time fan of Tuck Everlasting or just coming to the novel for the first time, Woodman-Maynard's graphic adaptation is a wonderful way to experience this timeless story.  

Book Review: Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt (1975)

The original cover of Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, 1975.

Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 young adult novel Tuck Everlasting is a fascinating look at life and death. It’s a book that I didn’t read growing up, but I must have heard the title, as it’s always stuck with me, for some reason. The fiftieth anniversary of the novel is coming up next year, and a new graphic novel adaptation is due out. When I found Tuck Everlasting in a Little Free Library recently, I took it as a sign that it was time to read it.  

Tuck Everlasting is the story of ten-year-old Winnie Foster, who lives in a small town called Treegap. Winnie’s parents and grandmother try their best to shelter her from the dangers of the outside world, and she spends most of her summer days within her fenced yard, longing to experience more of what’s on the other side.  

One day, Winnie wanders into the forest near her house. There she sees a handsome young man who is relaxing in the shade of a tree. He drinks from a small spring. Winnie starts talking to him and finds it curious that he does not want her to drink any water from the spring. When the young man’s mother and brother show up, they tell Winnie that they will have to take her with them.  

This strange family that has kidnapped Winnie are the Tucks, and it turns out that they drank water from this spring in the forest many years ago. Since that time, they have stopped aging and are immortal. They have tried to conceal the spring from anyone else, for fear that others would find it and exploit it.  

I won’t summarize the plot any further, for fear of spoiling this charming story. Tuck Everlasting brings up many philosophical questions: what would it mean to stop aging? What would it be like to be immortal? How would being immortal change the decisions that you made, and the way you lived?  

As a society and a culture, America tends to fear aging and death. Rather than face these parts of the life cycle head on, our culture just avoids them. I think one of the messages of Tuck Everlasting is to remind us to enjoy those special moments in life, as they are finite.  

Book Review: Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion (1970)

The cover of Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion, 1970.

She read the book quickly. It did not seem to matter much how the sentences were arranged, or whatever exactly the sentences said, because they all seemed very long and emotionless and the kind of sentences you could read for a very long time without really absorbing much of anything. The main character was an actress, but she didn’t seem to do much acting, and her agent was trying to get her to take more acting jobs so she wouldn’t be so depressed, and finally she did take this one acting job on a TV show, and that was the only time during the whole novel that she actually did some acting, but it was clear she didn’t like doing the TV show. The character was really depressed and isolated and bored, and that seemed to be the whole vibe the book was giving, depression and boredom. Ennui, that was it. Everything sounds better in French. Maybe instead of saying we’re depressed we should just start saying we have ennui, which made her think of Alain Delon lying around the swimming pool in La Piscine, and she thought of how gorgeous Romy Schneider was in La Piscine, and how if Alain Delon and Romy Schneider had a baby together it would have been so beautiful but they didn’t have a baby together and after Romy Schneider died so young Alain Delon never watched La Piscine again because it made him too sad, and that sounded very romantic and very French to her, to deprive yourself of a beautiful movie because it made you too sad and she thought of Alain Delon’s beautiful blue eyes filling with tears and that made her very sad.  

The one thing the actress liked doing was driving her car on the freeways, and that did seem like it would be pretty cool. She imagined if she had an old Corvette like this actress had and like Joan Didion had, you know, the kind with the long sexy hood and a T-top roof, but those old cars probably got really terrible gas mileage, and they probably weren’t good for the environment with their powerful, gas-guzzling, sexy V-8 engines that put out 300 horsepower. But they must have been fun to drive. She had never owned a car with 300 horsepower.  

She understood some of the reasons why the actress in this book was so depressed, because literally everything in her life was really terrible and awful. The actress was getting a divorce, and her husband seemed self-absorbed and egotistical, and there were probably a lot of men like that in Hollywood in those days, and the actress had this gay friend that she hung out with a lot, but he wasn’t like a fun gay best friend, he seemed like a drag as well, and he had a lot of money and his mother paid him money to be married to a woman, and that didn’t seem like too bad of a deal, really, because he was still doing whatever he wanted to and his wife didn’t really seem to care very much and he bought her expensive jewelry and she seemed pretty okay with this weird kind of bargain they had made.  

The one time this actress actually seemed to enjoy something, besides driving her car on the freeway, was when she went to the Hoover Dam. The actress wanted to lie down on the main water pipe in Hoover Dam, and as she read the book she wondered if there was something sexual about the Hoover Dam for the actress. Also, as she read this part about the Hoover Dam, she thought about how Joan Didion wrote about the Hoover Dam in her book The White Album. Joan Didion wrote: “Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize...” (The White Album, p.198) And that sounded kind of weird and nutty to her. The Hoover Dam was just a big, giant slab of concrete, it sounded much more fun to have a yellow Corvette in your dreams.  

And this actress had an abortion, and that part of the novel was really, truly, awful and she thought of Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” and she remembered reading that in high school and how the questions in the short story book told you that it was actually about an abortion, and she couldn’t quite remember if she had realized when she was reading it that it was about an abortion and she remembered reading “Hills Like White Elephants” again in an American Literature class in college, and she remembered asking the other students if they knew that it was about an abortion and it was her little dig at Hemingway because sometimes he was spare and close to the bone and beautiful and other times he was just abstruse and she wondered if it was hard for Hemingway to say what he actually meant and she thought how she liked F. Scott Fitzgerald better because he could write those beautiful gorgeous sentences that would just stop you in your tracks because they were so beautifully crafted and perfect.  

She didn’t know how many stars she should give this book. She could really justify any number from 1 to 5. One star because all of the people in it were really pretty awful and there wasn’t really anybody to sympathize with, although she did kind of sympathize with the actress because everything was so awful for her, but it was more like a kind of pity for the actress and you never really got to know any of the characters well enough to feel much emotion for them, but maybe that was the whole point of the book but then why go to all the trouble to write a whole book about these people if you weren’t really supposed to feel any emotion for them? Five stars because the book did what it was probably supposed to do, which was make you feel pretty awful and rotten and be glad you weren’t as depressed as this actress was, so it was effective in doing that, and other people had thought this book was good too, and that was part of the reason she had read the book was because other people said how good it was. She had read the book really quickly, over just two days, so that was good, but she hadn’t really enjoyed reading the book, although she figured that was part of the point, that the book wasn’t meant to be enjoyed. She finally settled on three stars. 

Book Review: Hear the Wing Sing/Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami (Originally published in 1979 and 1980)

The odd "one book is always upside down" design of the 2016 edition of Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball, 1973, by Haruki Murakami.

Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

Japanese author Haruki Murakami has fashioned a career as one of the most critically acclaimed novelists of the past 45 years. Murakami’s career began with two short novellas, Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and Pinball, 1973 (1980). The two novellas were collected in one volume published by Vintage International in 2016. I had heard of Murakami’s work for a long time, but what really sparked my interest was a presentation on Murakami by one of my students when I was teaching 10th grade World History. The student relayed Murakami’s story about the moment he decided he should write a novel: when he saw American baseball player Dave Hilton hit a double. I thought, “Okay, that was the moment he decided to become a novelist? I need to read some of his work.” Murakami writes about that moment in the introduction, concluding that “All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.” (p.xi)  

Throughout Hear the Wind Sing, Murakami refers back to fictional American author Derek Hartfield, who committed suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building in 1938. Hartfield is not presented as a great author, but a mediocre stylist who nevertheless emerges with an interesting piece of advice for authors: “What would be the point of writing a novel about things everyone already knows?” (p.79)  

Murakami references my favorite author F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hear the Wind Sing when he quotes these famous lines from Fitzgerald’s essay “The Crack-Up": “The test of a first-rate intelligence is its ability to function while holding two opposite ideas at the same time.” Neither the unnamed narrator nor the character known as the Rat can remember who said that brilliant quote, unfortunately. 

Hear the Wind Sing is an unconventional novel, as there’s very little plot or character development. It’s a mood piece, creating a feeling of ennui and stasis. I enjoyed reading Hear the Wind Sing and settling into the mood of the book.  

Pinball, 1973 I found less successful. Hear the Wind Sing more convincingly breaks the conventions of literature. There is no real plot to speak of. Whereas in Pinball, 1973, there was just enough plot for me to be annoyed that it doesn’t go anywhere or do anything. Once again, there’s an unnamed narrator, and the Rat is again a character. It’s not entirely clear if the narrator of Pinball, 1973 is the same narrator as the one in Hear the Wind Sing, and it ultimately doesn’t seem to matter.  

The narrator of Pinball, 1973 lives with two gorgeous twins, who are literally indistinguishable from each other. It’s clear that the narrator is having sex with both of the twins, and the storyline is so ridiculous that it just comes off as a puerile masturbatory fantasy, like something that Norman Mailer or Philip Roth would have come up with and then discarded as too unbelievable. I thought it would have been funnier if the narrator wasn’t sleeping with either of the twins, but that’s just me. Because the twins are indistinguishable from each other, they offer no character development, and their defining character trait is their devotion to the narrator.  

The plot of Pinball, 1973 revolves around the narrator’s attempt to track down an old pinball machine that he was obsessed with playing. Spoiler alert: he tracks it down, but then doesn’t even play it! He just has an imaginary conversation with the machine. Of course, the pinball machine’s voice is feminine.  

The book design of Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball, 1973 is too clever by half, as you have to flip the book upside down to read the second novella. It’s a gimmick that doesn’t serve any true purpose. 

Quibbles aside, I’d recommend Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball, 1973 to fans of Murakami’s who are interested in reading his first novellas. The book definitely sparked my interest in reading more of Murakami’s work.