“She touches the barrel to her chin, to her temple, back to her chin. She braces herself for the shock of it. She hopes for the thousandth time, millionth time, for some relief.”
Emma Straub called Casey Scieszka’s debut novel, The Fountain (Harper 2026), “like Tuck Everlasting for grown-ups,” and that perfectly sums up this delightful novel. It’s an easy read, a comforting familiarity in the story-telling that is reminiscent of books, including Tuck Everlasting, that framed my child and young adulthood. It’s the type of book that reminds me that I will always take a good story over literary tricks and books that think they are “smarter” than they are.
The year is 2014, and Vera Van Valkenburgh has returned home after 188 years. Something happened to her, her brother, and her mother when Vera was 26 and now, they cannot die. She hasn’t seen her mother in decades, and she only speaks to her brother once a year at this point. Vera has returned to her family’s homestead to find the source of their immortality in the hopes of reversing it. Imagine her surprise when her brother and another immortal who had known her brother’s wife show up as part of Fountain of Eternal Youth, LLC. They are also looking for the source, but not for the same reasons.
The book has whispers of a thriller that made me unable to put it down, but it’s the family and mortality of it that gives it its heartbeat. The pacing gets a bit off at the end, with a rush to action and quick resolution, and there are certain “twists” that are spelled out plainly long before the twists, but I still loved everything about this book except for the cover (I like the cover – just not for THIS story.)
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 