Babbitt, Natalie Books

Tuck Everlasting

Natalie Babbitt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1215 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Get ready to be grabbed 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Tuck Everlasting


This book will grab your free time if you like descriptions and usage of literary devices. This wonderful book is about a special family who meet a ten year old girl who learns their secret--a secret that in the wrong hands could cause a catastrophe.

What I liked about this book is that the author, Natalie Babbitt, uses descriptions to allow you to picture the scenes perfectly in your hopefully wonderful imagination. I loved this book inside and out because the author builds suspense through usage of carefully chosen literary devices. There wasn't a single part that I didn't like.

This book is wonderful. I would highly recommend you pay the seven dollars to buy this book if you want to be transported.

Editorial Review:

Imagine coming upon a fountain of youth in a forest. To live forever--isn't that everyone's ideal? For the Tuck family, eternal life is a reality, but their reaction to their fate is surprising. Award winner Natalie Babbitt (Knee-Knock Rise, The Search for Delicious) outdoes herself in this sensitive, moving adventure in which 10-year-old Winnie Foster is kidnapped, finds herself helping a murderer out of jail, and is eventually offered the ultimate gift--but doesn't know whether to accept it. Babbitt asks profound questions about the meaning of life and death, and leaves the reader with a greater appreciation for the perfect cycle of nature. Intense and powerful, exciting and poignant, Tuck Everlasting will last forever--in the reader's imagination. An ALA Notable Book. (Ages 9 to 12) --Emilie Coulter

All the Small Poems and Fourteen More (Sunburst Book)

Valerie Worth

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A wonderful collection! 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This book is a great collection of poems about nature. My children love these poems, and they are great to teach with.

A delightful read! 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

The late Valerie Worth is well remembered in this volume of nature poems. They are short and sweet, with neat imagery. I used this book to help my daughter, a struggling reader, to read, by reading with her, and sometimes singing the poems as though they were lyrics.
Simple titles like "Pie" and "Toad" evoke a simple life...yet the poems stir the imagination, too: "The watering can rusts among friends." Mm. Natalie Babbit's line drawings complement the poems without fail.

A great book for grown ups too! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Valerie Worth's incredible perspective of finding beauty and interest in simple things is a great lesson for all of us. I use this book with my 10 and 4 year-olds and enjoy it as much myself as they do. If I take a moment to really bask in each poem's simplicity and attention to detail I glean much wisdom from the expertly chosen words. Porches, Zinnia's, Old Tom, Rosebush are just a few of my favorite.

Editorial Review:

All four Small Poems books in one volume plus fourteen new poems "every bit as worthy as their predecessors" (The Horn Book)

Jack Plank Tells Tales

Natalie Babbitt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Yes, Jack Plank started out to be a pirate. His shipmates all liked him, and their ship, the Avarice, was certainly very beautiful. But after a while it was clear that he wasn’t much good at plundering. He just didn’t have the knack for it. So what to do? Jack did the only thing he could do—he went ashore to look for another line of work. The town was called Saltwash, on the coast of the Caribbean Sea, and he had a lot of helpful advice from the people in Mrs. DelFresno’s boardinghouse. Somehow, though, each career he looked into seemed to have something wrong with it. And every night at dinner in the boardinghouse, he tried to explain why. For who would want to work where there might be a troll, or the danger of getting a crab caught in your beard? Or what about a music-loving crocodile? There were other things, too, that ran against every suggestion and took the wind out of his sails. At last, Jack sadly decided he wouldn’t be good at anything onshore and would have to go back to sea, pirate or not. But sometimes, as you probably know already, things work out very nicely when you least expect it.

The Search for Delicious

Natalie Babbitt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An afternoon read 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is great for a short afternoon read by the pool. The book can be read in an hour or two at most. It is light and easy to read but has deeper themes for those who care to look for them. It speaks to human nature and enviormental issues.

Delightfully delicious!! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I recently purchased this book at a Scholastic Book Fair at my daughter's elementary school, not realizing that it was written in 1969 and it was a reissued edition with an updated and modern cover. While reading it, I just couldn't put it down, and thought that it was a newly written book...not that this little aside matters....but it was a wonderful read. The issues addressed in this book are relevant to whatever time one picks it up and reads this book. "The Search For Delicious" is one of those magical and timeless books that can be read on many levels. It is a marvelous read aloud story for the younger children, an adventure story for the 8-12 year olds and a story with a very deep and life changing meaning for teens and adults. It won't take you long to read this little gem, so don't hesitate to purchase this book. Oh, one last thought: my reluctant 10 year old reader is having a hard time putting "The Search For Delicious" down!!! (I did not give a detailed play by play of this book, because a previous reviewer did an excellent job with that! Just wanted to assure you, that this is a "delicious" read!!

Editorial Review:

Gaylen, the King’s messenger, a skinny boy of twelve, is off to poll the kingdom, traveling from town to farmstead to town on his horse, Marrow. At first it is merely a question of disagreement at the royal castle over which food should stand for Delicious in the new dictionary. But soon it seems that the search for Delicious had better succeed if civil war is to be avoided.
Gaylen’s quest leads him to the woldweller, a wise, 900-year-old creature who lives alone at the precise center of the forest; to Canto, the minstrel who sings him an old song about a mermaid child and who gives him a peculiar good-luck charm; to the underground domain of the dwarfs; and finally to Ardis who might save the kingdom from havoc.

Kneeknock Rise

Natalie Babbitt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

the clarity of not knowing 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Others have told the story of this children's book, so I won't rehash it. Some of the younger readers have also shown their jaded natures in panning it, but I found it to be interesting, if a bit disconcerting, which is, perhaps, what the author wanted the book to be all about. I am not sure. Babbitt's writing style has some very, very good visual images, and her characterizations are well-drawn. My rating starts with that, at least.

But it is the 'moral' of the story that continues to bother me. We all find out that some things we believed in childhood, are no longer true when we come to a certain age; and that is a part of growing up.

But what we come to find is not true, often are not the things themselves, but how OTHERS have viewed them- and it is this false insight, which make us cynical as we age. That is both an enlightenment and a curse. And that, I think, is the 'moral' the author conveys in Kneeknock rise. At least Babbitt leaves us with the understanding that both the uncle and the child know 'what is true,' but BOTH are content to understand it as true in their own way, without coming to believe that the world they inhabit is false- rather, they know truth as part of the whole, and realize the delusion rests just among the mortals with which they have to interact.

Age range for this novel is difficult to pin down. As an adult, the 'moral' is still resonating with me, a week after I read it. But the simple conclusion the book COULD afford, means that it should not be read to those too young to grasp the subtlety of,for instance, say the real person- St. Nicholas of Myra; (who did exist, and does within the pantheon of Orthodox saints) and our American Santa claus, who.... well, you know.

Age range? oh, 9-10. I think one could even assign this as a book to read, but it might/should be better as a 'read-aloud' at home, with parents to answer the tough existential questions. But even here, one has to ask one's self the question, do we want a cynical 10 year old...or at least one more... around, when the joy of childhood and it's naivete are so much more to be prized? As a HS dad, I find the already encroaching worldliness of a child having spent ONE year in PS hard to bear. Now that I am HS myself, that innocence and gentleness of spirit is slowly returning. And that is something I would not want to die within myself, or my children. A book such as this is potent stuff, in an age of cynicism run amok. Therefore, to read or not to read,
That is a question each parent will have to ask himself.

Editorial Review:

From the moment young Egan arrives in Instep for the annual fair, he is entranced by the fable surrounding the misty peak of Kneeknock Rise: On stormy nights when the rain drives harsh and cold, an undiscovered creature raises its voice and moans. Nobody knows what it is—nobody has ever dared to try to find out and come back again. Before long, Egan is climbing the Rise to find an answer to the mystery.

The Eyes of the Amaryllis

Natalie Babbitt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Mysterious fathoms below 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Before reading "The Eyes of the Amaryllis", I'd harbored the secret suspicion that Natalie Babbitt's best known work, "Tuck Everlasting", was a fluke. I don't mean to say that the great writing found in that book was of a fluke-like nature. I mean that I thought of Babbitt as a children's author who preferred to write realistic fiction and once, in the case of "Tuck", wrote something fantastical. I don't know where I got that idea. Maybe it came from "Tuck" itself. There's something about that book that feels a little too natural. Like the author would much rather be writing about hardcore issues and is just using the whole "living forever" thing as a metaphor. So when I picked up "The Eyes of the Amaryllis", I thought I'd know what to expect. A straightforward story about a girl and her grandmother by the sea. What I got instead was a supernatural thriller in which two mortal souls go head to head with forces they cannot hope to understand. Thrilling? You don't know the half of it.

Though named after her father's mother, Jenny Reade has never visited the old woman at her house by the sea. This is mostly because Jenny's father is afraid of that cruel old ocean. Years ago, when he was just a teen, her dad watched in horror as his father's ship, the Amaryllis, went down in a catastrophic storm. Since that time he has been afraid of the vastness of the ocean while his mother, the hardened woman Geneva Reade, has waited patiently for a sign from her drowned husband. When Jenny comes to stay with Geneva for a couple weeks, she thinks she's just going to do some chores and play by the seaside. Instead, she becomes enmeshed in a wild adventure. For while Geneva's husband does indeed send his wife a sign, the sea is not happy with the gift and demands it back. By force, as it happens.

Reading this book, I found it was rather similar to "Daughter of the Sea" by Berlie Doherty. Both books praise the ocean to no end, but if I were to choose the stronger of the two, "The Eyes of the Amaryllis" wins hands down. Babbitt's in fine form here. The reader begins the tale with as much healthy skepticism as Jenny herself, and ends up believing her grandmother's wild stories just as the heroine does. There are beautiful descriptive passages here and a wonderfully exciting climax with a hurricane. There are ghosts, drowned men, and mysterious presents that are never meant to be kept. I've little doubt that Babbitt herself has spent a lot of time with the ocean. This book is a love story to a powerful, dangerous thing.

For those readers who enjoyed "Tuck Everlasting" and wouldn't mind a little more Babbitty weirdness in their reading diet, "The Eyes of the Amaryllis" is a fine follow-up. It's not particularly long (so reluctant readers will rejoice) and the plot is fast-paced without ever feeling stilted. For any kid who hungers for tales of ghosts and mysteries, go no farther than this fog-swept tale.

Editorial Review:

When the brig Amaryllis was swallowed in a hurricane, the captain and all the crew were swallowed, too. For thirty years the captain’s widow, Geneva Reade, has waited, certain that her husband will send her a message from the bottom of the sea. But someone else is waiting, too, and watching her, a man called Seward. Into this haunted situation comes Jenny, the widow’s granddaughter. The three of them, Gran, Jenny, and Seward, are drawn into a kind of deadly game with one another and with the sea, a game that only the sea knows how to win.

Tuck para siempre

Natalie Babbitt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The Best book I Have Ever Read 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

The best boks I have ever read u ask? Thats EASY! Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt. Tuck Everlasting is about a 10 year old girl named Winnie Foster who lives in a town called Treegap. One day she stumbles across a "17 year old" guy named Jesse Tuck in the wood her family owns. She fights with him over a spring she comes across and sees him drinking out of. She faints, but when she comes to, she is on the back of Mae Tuck's (Jesse's mom)horse. They take her back to thier cottage and tell her a wonderful story about how they drank from that spring and are now immortal. She stays with the Tucks over night, but a man in a yellow suit had already arranged a deal with her parents: If he can bring Winnie home, they will give him the wood. He tells the Tucks how he is going to market the spring water, and he wants them to help him advertise. Mae gets mad, and in a frantic attempt to save Winnie and the water, she accidentaly kills the man. Jesse gives Winnie a bottle of the water and tells her to wait until she is 17 to drink it so they can get married. I won't give away the ending, but I will tell you that I didn't think it ended the way it was supposed to, and it made me literally cry. I hope it can be as enjoyable for you as it has been for me, and I hope there is a book like it somewhere in the world that I happen to come across.

Editorial Review:

Spanish translation of the story of the Tuck family, who faces an agonizing situation when they learn that a ten-year-old girl and an evil stranger share their secret to eternal life.

Goody Hall

Natalie Babbitt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

DO NOT PAY ATTENTION TO THE READING LEVEL! 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 12 people found this review helpful.

Although this book is recommended for eight-year-olds, the plot and some of the dialougue would be hard for them to understand. I am an avid fifteen-year-old reader and found this book wonderful! Almost as well written as "The Devil's Storybook" and "Tuck Everlasting".

My favorite book 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I love this book so much that it has taken me several tries to write a review.

How perfect can a book be? Funny, mysterious, deep, intellectual, all in one title. A story about a young man finding himself, and a woman doing the same, with the supporting cast either having already done the work or just plain not interested. (And just like in real life, the people who have no interest in improving themselves are in very happy ignorance, while the ones who are searching for truth are in what seems unsurmountable angst.)

It's the juggling of the several stories, interwoven with Greek mythology, that seems so miraculous to me. The title comes from the name of the house in which most of the action takes place, the grand and beautiful home of Midas Goody. If you don't know any Greek mythology, you'll miss that he made a bad deal, like king Midas--but--and this is the fantastic part--if you miss that you will still understand and enjoy the story. The main character is named after the Greek hero Hercules but is not heroic. The turning point of the story is a trip to Cerberus--or, if you don't know your myths, it's just a venture into an old tomb.

I can't, in this review, make it clear how funny and true this book is. Not only my fave Natalie Babbitt, but my very favorite book.

Editorial Review:

An out-of-work actor, Hercules Feltwright, stumbles into a job tutoring Willet Goody, the only child of a widow living in a large, lonely house. Willet quickly involves his tutor in the search to discover the truth about his father. The mystery unfolds with the discovery of hidden treasure, a gypsy séance, and the frightening exploration of the tomb of Midas Goody.

The Devil's Storybook (Sunburst Book)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Not something C.S. Lewis would have approved of... 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

...because the Devil herein seems almost like an ordinary person, just with an itch to make trouble and boss minor demons around. Both this and its companion volume, THE DEVIL'S OTHER STORYBOOK, were illustrated by the author; the original cover art of each shows the Devil reading the book. (He's drawn in standard Mephistopheles style, goatee, horns, tail, cloven hooves - and whenever he's shown in disguise in an individual story's illustration, the tail is visible to the reader, curled up behind his back or whatnot.)

Both books open with a stanza or two from the poet Robert Southey, "From his brimstone bed, at break of day, a-walking the Devil is gone, to look at his little snug farm of the World, and see how his stock went on." Most (but not all) the stories follow that pattern - the Devil getting bored and going out for a stroll to stir things up. He doesn't buy souls at all - he just makes trouble on his occasional visits to the world and people make their own decisions about how to handle their problems.

Most of the stories (all very short) have a kind of moral, if you look at them carefully, but Babbitt has a light touch.

"Wishes" On a dull day, 'the Devil fished around in his bag of disguises, dressed himself as a fairy godmother, and came up into the World to find someone to bother.' But the first two people he encounters are a crabby old woman and an old man who's at peace with himself - and each foils the old boy (the old lady's comeback catches even the Devil off guard). But along comes contestant #3, a foolish young man.

"The Very Pretty Lady" had many suitors, but wanted to be loved for herself - or so she said, although truth be told she enjoyed her looks and the fawning young men very much. Then the Devil got to hear of her, and figured she was just what he needed to brighten up the place, and went out to have a look at her, and set about coaxing her to join him of her own free will.

"The Harps of Heaven" - the Devil doesn't have any, and he's been stung by a nagging piano teacher's remarks about the quality of music in Hell, so when a pair of brothers who were the best thieves in the world wind up on his doorstep, he's got a little job for them.

"The Imp in the Basket" Instead of following the Devil's activities, this follows a very good man - a clergyman who tries to think well of everybody - beginning with the most severe test of his life: a little imp has been left on his doorstep, a devil's baby rather than a human one. But he knows that even the Devil was an angel once, so maybe there's hope even for this little one.

"Nuts" The Devil, like anybody else who eats walnuts, complains about the nuisance of cracking them open - then gets a bright idea about how to trick a human into doing it for him: hide a pearl inside a walnut shell, then tempt a greedy person into opening the lot looking for more pearls. But as often happens, his mischief doesn't work out the way he planned.

"A Palindrome" is a word or phrase that's the same whether spelled backward or forward. In this case, the Devil wants a particular artist - a painter whose pictures are much admired in Hell, but who's a good man - to become his #1 painter, so after the artist has produced his 40th picture, the Devil sets about making life difficult for him to tempt him away from his good life.

"Ashes" Mr. Bezzle (yes, Babbitt likes puns occasionally), a bad man 'who made a great deal of money by cheating shamefully', was cremated after he died, and his ashes on the mantel of his widow's house were just as warm as he himself was. But when a grumpy housemaid knocked the urn over and was careless about sweeping up, he couldn't understand why a pig suddenly showed up in Hell and began following him around. :)

"Perfection" The Devil (like some readers, to be honest) has gotten fed up with a goody-two-shoes little girl named Angela, and he's determined to annoy her into losing her temper a few times so she'll stop being so perfect.

"The Rose and the Minor Demon" The minor demon isn't really evil, but since he doesn't have anyplace else to go, his job is to guard the Devil's treasury - even though nobody *ever* tries to steal anything, of course. But looking at a vase painted with roses, he starts wanting to plant a garden of his own - but the Devil, of course, has strict instructions about what he's allowed to plant.

"The Power of Speech" The Devil likes an occasional pet, but in keeping with his character - in this case he wants a pet goat named Walpurgis, but the old lady who owns him belled him, because the Devil can't stand the sound of bells. Then the Devil got an idea for how to make the old lady stop wanting to protect her pet...

Editorial Review:

An ALA Notable Book
Chosen by School Library Journal as one of the Best of the Best Books

Something

Natalie Babbitt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

CHILDREN'S BOOK FOR CHILDREN OF AGES 4-100 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Natalie Babbitt writes beautiful books, books with wit and charm and actually very original complex storylines that just sweep you away with their themes. They are very unusual themes, ones that people have never thought of before, and that's what makes them so interesting. I am 14 years old and I still love these short books, they are absolutely fantastic. This one being no exception.

Editorial Review:

With his mother's help, Mylo discovers a way to conquer his fear of the dark.