This is definitely a charming older children's fantasy book!! Winnie Foster's family owns the Treegap Wood, and is unaware that there-in lies a spring whose water when consumed imparts everlasting life. The Tucks (Angus, Mae, Miles and Jesse) know this secret and would like to keep the knowledge (for good reasons) away from others... except maybe Winnie. Will Winnie take advantage of this amazing chance? Would you?
'The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot.'(opening lines)
'But things come together in strange ways. The wood was a the center, the hub of the wheel. All wheels must have a hub. A Ferris wheel has one, as the sun is the hub of the wheeling calendar. Fixed points they are, and best left undisturbed, for without them nothing holds together. But sometimes people find this out too late.'(4)
'Nothing ever seems interesting when it belongs to you -- only when it doesn't.'(7)
'In the end, however, it was the cows who were responsible for the wood's isolation, and the cows, through some wisdom they were not wise enough to know that they possessed, were very wise indeed. If they had made their road through the wood instead of around it, then the people would have followed the road. The people would have noticed the giant ash trees at the center of the wood, and then, in time, they'd noticed the little spring bubbling up among its roots in spite of the pebbles piled there to conceal it. And that would have been a disaster so immense that this weary old earth, owned or not to its fiery cone, would have trembled on its axis like a beetle on a pin.'(8)
'Mae Tuck didn't need a mirror, though she had one propped up on the washstand. She knew very well what she would see in it; her reflection had long since ceased to interest her. For Mae Tuck, and her husband, and Miles and Jesse, too, had all looked exactly the same for eighty-seven years.'(12)
'For the wood was full of light, entirely different from the light she was used to. It was green and amber and alive, quivering in splotches on the padded ground, fanning into sturdy stripes between the tree trunks. There were little flowers she did not recognize, white and palest blue; and endless, tangled vines; and here and there a fallen log, half rotted but soft with patches of sweet green-velvet moss.
And there were creatures everywhere. The air fairly hummed with their daybreak activity: beetles and birds and squirrels and ants, and countless other things unseen, all gentle and self-absorbed and not in the least alarming. There was even, she saw with satisfaction, the toad.'(24)
"We don't know how it works, or even why," said Miles.
"Pa thinks it's something left over from -- well, from some other plan for the way the world should be," said Jesse. "Some plan that didn't work out too good. And so everything was changed. Except that the spring was passed over, somehow or other."(41)
"Life's got to be lived, no matter how long or short," she said calmly. "You got to take what comes. We just go along, like everybody else, one day at a time."(54)
"Know what happens then?" said Tuck. "To the water? The sun sucks some of it up right out of the ocean and carries it back in clouds, and then it rains, and the rain falls into the stream, and the stream keeps moving on, taking it all back again. It's a wheel, Winnie. Everything's a wheel, turning it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is."(62)
"The way I see it," Miles went on, "it's no good hiding yourself away, like Pa and lots of other people. And it's no good just thinking of your own pleasure, either. People got to do something useful if they're going to take up space in the world."(86-87)
First Square Fish Edition 2007
139 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
Book idea from Melissa@ The Avid Reader's Musings (thanks!!)
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After assigning numbers 1-187 to the valid entries (comments with an e-mail address) in the order that they were posted (minus any duplications), the winning number picked through Random.org is:
#115 - stacybuckeye
Congratulations!! Thanks to all who participated.
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