When I was in 5th grade, we were assigned Tuck Everlasting in our English class. This was a seriously disturbing book to me - it was about a family that had found a spring out in the woods that if you drank from it it made you immortal. So this whole family lived forever. A little girl meets them, stuff happens, and she wants to drink the water also but they won't let her. The moral is that it's really horrible to be immortal because everything you care about dies around you and you lose everyone. I suppose as a kid's book it was supposed to give the message that death is just part of the natural order of things (they did the whole the earth and all life on it is part of one big cycle thing) However, I didn't feel that this book had anything uplifting to say to children about living the life that you were given and facing death by being satisfied with the life you lived, or any alternative positive message. It only served to make death less scary by saying that the alternative is a whole lot worse. I think that is an incredibly un-comforting, nihilistic message to give children, or to hold in general.

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