By Natalie Babbitt
A girl meets a family who can never die, and has to decide whether living forever is a gift or the loneliest thing she can imagine.
Ten-year-old Winnie Foster is bored and hemmed in by a family that watches her every move. One hot morning she slips into the woods her family owns and finds a boy drinking from a hidden spring. He is Jesse Tuck, and he begs her not to drink from it. She soon learns why: eighty-seven years ago the whole Tuck family drank from that spring, and they stopped aging, stopped changing, stopped being able to die. They take Winnie home with them to explain the secret they've carried alone for a lifetime, and to ask her to keep it. But a stranger in a yellow suit has been listening, and he wants the spring for himself.
It reads short and gentle, but it hands a room the biggest question there is and trusts children to wrestle it: if you never had to die, would you want to. The writing is plain and lovely, the chapters are short, and the whole thing turns on a choice Winnie has to make that every reader will argue about. That's exactly what makes it a class favorite for a novel study. It's a real, thoughtful book that a mixed group can all read and all have an opinion on, and the ending will keep them talking long after the last page.