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This is a story about a girl named Winnie who lives with her mother and grandmother
in the town of Treegap. Her family is fairly wealthy, owning the nearby woods.
However, Winnie is unhappy at home and decides to venture in the woods. She comes across
a young man named Jesse Tuck, who claims to be over one hundred years old, but Winnie
does not believe him. She asks to drink the water from a nearby spring, but Jesse insists
that she not.
Suddenly, Mae and Miles appear, Jesse's mother and brother. Mae, aware of Winnie's request
to drink the water, decides to kidnap Winnie and take her to their home. However, as they
are heading back home, a man in a yellow suit sees Winnie and follows them.
At the Tuck's home, Winnie is greeted by Angus, Mae's husband. Collectively, the family tells
Winnie that they are immortal because they drank from a magic spring in the woods. At
first, Winnie doesn't believe them, but because they are so nice to her, she believes them.
However, the man in the yellow suit hears their story and returns back to Treegap.
The man with the yellow suit tells Winnie's family that he'll help them get Winnie back
safely if they sign away their ownership to the woods. Winnie's family makes the deal
and the man in the suit goes to retrieve Winnie.
The man in the yellow suit confronts the Tuck's and explains that he will soon own the woods
and the magical water. After hearing about the man's plan to sell the water, Mae hits
the man with a gun. She is arrested and the man is rushed to a doctor. He eventually dies.
Mae is held in the local jail and sentenced to be hanged. The Tuck's decide to break her
out and Winnie wants to help.
Jesse, who has grown to like Winnie, offers her a small vile of the magical spring water
and tells her to drink it when she's seventeen so that they can live as young adults forever.
The breakout is successful as Winnie pretends to be Mae in the jail cell while the family
escapes. In the end, Angus and Mae return to Treetop many years later to find Winnie's
tombstone, revealing that she never drank the magical spring water.
This story centers around the concept of immortality and what it truly means to be immortal. Traditionally,
society is enamored by the idea of living forever. There is an array of products that
try to keep humans looking younger for longer. However, these are merely attempts to look
immortal and are not true immortality.
Looking at immortality more closely, readers can see that it is more of a curse than a
gift. The Tuck's explain all of the downsides of being immortal, such as the loss of family
and friends, constant moving, and others suspecting witchcraft.
But perhaps the biggest detriment of immortality is the lack of a complete and circular life,
as described in the many images of water throughout the story. As Angus explains to Winnie, water
is always moving in a cycle. And it's this constant movement that gives it life. A life
is made up of different phases and periods, and without the completeness of the death
phase, life becomes stagnant and incomplete.