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.
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