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: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers (1940)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the 1940 novel by Carson McCullers, is one of those books that I’ve known about for many years and finally got around to reading. Sometimes classics just escape your attention. I read McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe for a class on short novels in high school, and I really enjoyed it.  

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was McCullers’ first novel, and it’s a fascinating portrait of the residents of a small Southern town. McCullers does a wonderful job of entering into the psyches of the different characters.  

The characters are an eccentric bunch. There’s the proud Black doctor Benedict Mady Copeland, cafe owner Biff Brannon, Socialist drifter Jake Blount, and tomboy Margaret Kelly, nicknamed “Mick.” At the hub of this wheel of disparate characters is John Singer, who is deaf and speaks only in sign language. The other characters all confide in Singer, and he becomes something of a priestly figure, offering them a kind of silent benediction and absolution. Singer himself remains inscrutable, but that does not matter to the people who confide in him.  

McCullers describes the interest in the town about Singer: “The rumors about him grew bolder...The rich thought that he was rich and the poor considered him a poor man like themselves. And as there was no way to disprove these rumors they grew marvelous and very real. Each man described the mute as they wished him to be.” (p.223) Singer becomes a mirror for whoever interacts with him. This might not be intentional on Singer’s part—people see in him what they want to see. It’s not his fault if people read into his personality.  

The characters in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter are all rich, vibrant, complex, living people. The novel is a testament to McCullers’ skill and her ability to see through the eyes of other people. Mick Kelly’s love of music, and her desire to become a musician are especially heartfelt and poignant. For me, Mick’s adolescent yearning for something more became the emotional center of the novel.  

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a novel that speaks deeply to our need to connect to each other as human beings, and how difficult it can be to find those connections. It’s a novel that everyone should read.   

Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, Edited by Larry W. Phillips (1985)

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips, is a slim volume of 96 pages that collects Fitzgerald’s advice and thoughts on the craft that he practiced. Originally published in 1985, it was recently reprinted in November 2024. It was a book that had escaped my attention until I saw it in a bookstore this spring. I was quite surprised that there was a compilation of Fitzgerald’s writing that I was unaware of.  

The later volume F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, from 1996, covers similar ground as F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, as you might expect from the titles. While FSF on Authorship is a more scholarly tome, including the full text of Fitzgerald’s various articles and essays on writing, FSF on Writing features brief excerpts from Fitzgerald’s writing and is meant for a more general audience. FSF on Authorship is also twice as long as FSF on Writing. Phillips selected some relevant quotes from Fitzgerald’s novels about writing. One of my favorites is from his novel The Beautiful and Damned: “Dick doesn’t necessarily see more than anyone else. He merely can put down a larger proportion of what he sees.” (p.9) This seems to me an apt quotation that applied to Fitzgerald himself as well.  

There are many fantastic quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing. One of my favorites is this one: “It is my old contention that tiredness, boredom, exhaustion, etc., must not be conveyed by the symbols which they show in life, in fact, can’t be so conveyed in literature because boredom is essentially boring and tiredness is essentially tiring.” (p.37)   

Fitzgerald’s admiration for the Polish/British novelist Joseph Conrad comes through strongly in this volume. Fitzgerald wrote: “I’d rather have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel.” (p.41) I suspect that Conrad’s novels Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim strongly influenced Fitzgerald as he wrote The Great Gatsby, particularly in his decision to make Nick Carraway a partially involved narrator, after the fashion of Conrad’s narrator Marlow.  

A quote that I found fascinating comes from a letter that Fitzgerald wrote to Andrew Turnbull in 1933. Turnbull, a future biographer of Fitzgerald, was 12 years old in 1933, and Fitzgerald was renting a house on the Turnbull family property. Fitzgerald wrote: “Nobody naturally likes a mind quicker than their own and more capable of getting its operation into words. It is practically something to conceal. The history of men’s minds has been the concealing of them, until men cry out for intelligence, and the thing has to be brought into use...most of the great things you learn in life are in periods of enforced silence.” (p.82-3)  

I find that a fascinating idea, that men conceal their intelligence until it has to be used. Fitzgerald was fond of showing off his intelligence at a young age, and he understood how that intelligence isolated him. This fits perfectly with one of my favorite quotes about Fitzgerald’s personality. One of his colleagues from the army said of Fitzgerald, “He was eager to be liked by his companions and almost vain in seeking praise. At the same time he was unwilling to conform to the various patterns of dullness and majority opinion which would insure popularity.” (The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, p.23) This captures Fitzgerald so well—he wanted to be liked, but he was far too intelligent to be a conformist. At some point during his life, Fitzgerald understood it was better to draw less attention to his intelligence.  

There are so many terrific nuggets in F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing. Some of my favorites are: “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” (p.3) “Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it.” (p.13) “You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.” (p.52) F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly a writer who had something important to say.