I really wasn't expecting to say this, especially given that the cover of my movie tie-in edition for the 2002 Disney adaptation makes it look like a historical YA romance, but I adored this. Based on the cover art alone, I wouldn't have even picked up the book. Based on the first page of the text, I found myself comparing Natalie Babbitt to Ray Bradbury. Based on the entire story, this is easily one of my favourite reads from this project so far, up there with other new discoveries for me like 'Lud-in-the-Mist' and 'The Phantom Tollbooth'. It's a gem.

That first page introduces us to the town of Treegap and its geography in a leisurely, deceptively tranquil manner, before darkening the mood for the wood on the outskirts of town that's owned by the Fosters. Nobody goes in, not even its owners, not least because there's no road. But there is a clearing at its centre, with a spring babbling around the roots of an ash tree. The very first person to go into the wood in living memory, at least as far as we're aware, is Winnie Foster, who decides at the age of ten, nearly eleven, that she's going to run away from home.

We're never entirely sure why she wants to run away, but it has to do with being an only child and so having nobody her age to talk to, the latter being a notion to which we'll soon return in a very different context as the book runs on. She walks into the wood and she finds the clearing and the spring and the ash tree and, right there where she doesn't expect to find anyone, she finds Jesse Tuck, who emphatically doesn't want her to drink from the spring, however thirsty she might be.

If I didn't dislike the cover art already, I disliked it all the more when I realised that the girl in the apparent historical romance isn't really fifteen, as she becomes in the movie, she's Winnie Foster, ten, almost eleven, while the boy in the same film looks seventeen but is secretly a hundred and four. Instead, Babbitt handles this the way it should be handled, with Winnie ironically suggesting, "Seventeen. That's old." I like that.

There is a hint of a romance to come, with Jesse finally asking Winnie if she might wait until she's seventeen to drink the water, so they could then be married at effectively the same age, but it's less of an excuse for paedophilia and more a neat echo of why Winnie ran away; because he hasn't had anyone his age to talk for the past eighty years. He's not lusting after this pre-pubescent girl; he's seeing an end to most of a century of isolation.

And, after Mae and Miles, Jesse's mother and older brother respectively, kidnap Winnie because they deem it important that she know the real story before she does anything she'll regret, we're let in on the story too back at their place. They're all immortal because they drank from the spring, eighty-seven years earlier, and found that they no longer aged. Or died. Their horse lived on, because it also drank from the spring. Their cat died of natural causes, because it didn't. The logic is clear.

And it isn't as great as it sounds, they say. Miles was happily married, but his wife left him, taking their two kids with her, when he reached forty but still looked twenty-two. We already know that Jesse's been stuck at seventeen for most of a century. If Winnie drank from the spring now, at ten years old, she'd be a little girl forever, and while she didn't have 'Interview with a Vampire' in 1880 to tell her how badly that works out, it seems pretty clear anyway.

So far, so good. Winnie's run away from home, stumbled onto a secret and been kidnapped, kinda/sorta, and all that together is a heck of a lot for a ten-year-old girl to deal with, but she's given it with serious context. Babbitt seems to write simply for her audience of children, but there's real magic in her phrasing. She's natural with dialogue and realistic with progression, but sees poetry in nature and passes it on to us without apparent effort. The story here is wonderful, but she got me with mere descriptions of the countryside. How's this for an example?

"The pastures, fields, and scrubby groves they crossed were vigorous with bees, and crickets leapt before them as if each step released a spring and flung them up like pebbles. But everything else was motionless, dry as biscuit, on the brink of burning, hoarding final reservoirs of sap, trying to hold out till the rain returned, and Queen Anne's lace lay dusty on the surface of the meadows like foam on a painted sea."

Yes, I read that one aloud to myself just to hear the words spoken and it was far from the only one that sparked that urgent need. It's beautiful writing and chapter twelve adds depth to beauty, as Angus Tuck takes Winnie out on the lake and explains in words a twelve-year-old would understand what life really means. Suddenly, we feel not just the joy of all those years lived but the weight of them and the opportunities missed. No wonder the Tuck boys go their separate ways to wander as they will, but come back to reunite every decade in the first week of August. There's huge danger in eternity.

There's a secondary plot set up early but triggered late that escalates that danger, epitomised in the person of a man in a yellow suit. He isn't immortal but he's heard stories from his grandma, an old lady who knew Miles's wife long ago, and he's come to learn what he can and take what he can for his own benefit. This would be a very different story without him, one that might have reached that romance one day, or maybe not. We'll never know because he steals the Tuck's horse and tells the Fosters where their daughter is, once they've promised to give him the wood for the location. And then he reports the kidnap to the police.

This isn't a long book, wrapping up in fewer than a hundred and forty pages even in slightly larger type for children, but there's plenty more to come: action and intrigue, rescue and subterfuge, an imminent horror turned into a slap on the wrist. By the end, there's also a deep sadness in what is surely an inevitable loss, but it's sweetened by the peripheral knowledge of a life well-lived. I will not say more than that and it may have been too much already, but this is a book to return to and read again and again. You deserve to read it through once without spoilers, but you'll come back to it over and over, knowing exactly what happens, and you'll love it just as much, if not more.

At least I will. This is the sort of story I wish I'd read at ten-years-old. This sort of gentle majesty is something best experienced young and then revisited as we age. I can only guess that it's one of those rare books that will grow with us, meaning something different each time we devour it, but I'll be shocked to find that isn't true when I dive into it again, however many years into the future. If you haven't read it, go and find it, even if it has that ridiculous Disney movie tie-in cover. There are plenty of other editions. I look forward to snapping one up in the wild when I least expect it. ~~ Hal C F Astell