Youth Book Club Kit Questions
Tuck Everlasting
By Natalie Babbitt
1. What is your impression of Winnie Foster in the first couple of chapters of the book?
2. What does Winnie’s treatment of the toad, early on, then again later in the book tell you about the changes she undergoes?
3. What are the first hints there is something unusual about the Tucks?
4. The Tuck family tells “the strangest story Winnie had ever heard.” What is it? Do you believe what they told her?
5. Compare Mile’s and Jesse’s feelings about being able to live forever. Which character’s feelings are closest to your own? Why and why not?
6. The Tucks have some interesting meantime routines. Is it a good thing to have set routines like mealtimes or not? Why do families have routines at all? Do you? What are they?
7. Compare Winnie Foster’s home, the touch-me-not cottage, to the Tuck’s old place in the words. Where would you prefer to live? Why?
8. Mae Tuck says she and her family “…don’t deserve no blessings – if it is a blessing?” Would living forever be a blessing or a curse?
9. What would happen today if a magical spring promising eternal life were found today?
10. In what ways is life like a wheel or like a stream, as Tuck tells Winnie?
11. “At midnight, she would make a difference in the world.” How does Winnie’s decision to help Mae Tuck escape from jail make a difference in the world?
12. Near the end of the book, Winnie’s family “sensed that she was different now from what she had been before. As if some part of her had slipped away.” How is Winnie different form the girl she once was? What part of her slipped away? Have you ever had anything happened that changed you?