Immortal Beloved: Tuck Everlasting

Our latest car book was Tuck Everlasting, written by Natalie Babbitt and read by Melissa Hughes.  It took a while to find a pattern for listening; X is the main audio book enthusiast but actually spends very little time in the car.  Neither N nor A showed much interest, while P remembered his teacher reading this book to his class last year.  The final decision had me listening when alone or with just P, since he could dip in and out and use his memory to fill in the blanks.

As with most audio books I pick, I had read this before, but not for decades.  I liked Hughes's narration; she gave each character a distinctive voice without sounding fake or pretentious.  It was fun for me to see what was familiar and what had completely vanished from my memory.  The toad and Winnie's choice had stayed vividly in my mind, but I had forgotten her crush on Jesse.  I remembered there had a been a villain planning to commercialize the spring, but his actual plot and his death had fallen through the cracks, so the story had suspense for me this time around.  At three disks long, it's pretty much the perfect length for a week or so of trundling around schools, and Winnie's grasp of the issues and problems stayed both realistically young and respectfully profound.  I did quibble at some of the legal issues, but in general really enjoyed hearing this story again.