Once, about fifteen years ago, my friends Katie and Christine were working in the bookstore at the Newberry Library. One Saturday, I visited them, and while they were busy, started browsing the books upstairs. I came across Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Teribithia, which was one of my favorite books when I was young. I sat down with the book. Before I knew it, I had read the whole book sitting right there on the floor in the bookstore. The afternoon had grown dark, my back hurt and my face was wet with tears. It’s a children’s book; one which reaches the depth and understanding of adulthood, of childhood, and everything in between–art, music, compassion, friendship, education, imagination, love, class, struggle. It moved me when I was young and still had the power when I was an adult.
Katherine Paterson won the Newbery Medal Book Award for Bridge to Teribithia in 1978. In case you don’t know it (in which case you should read it ASAP), it’s the story of Jess, who lives with his four sisters and parents in a tiny house. His father, who is always out working, doesn’t approve of Jess’s interest and talent in art but loves him in a very strict way. Besides his little sister, Jess has one friend, Miss Edmunds, a hippie music teacher who teaches the kids the words to Free to Be You and Me, and wants to look at Jess’s drawings. Jess has spent the summer before fifth grade practicing to be the fastest runner in his class. On the first day of school, he lines up with the other boys ready to run. He’s shocked to find that he comes in second place, and to someone he’s never seen before, and even more humiliating–his victor is a girl. Her name is Leslie.
He sees her again a few days later when he is milking his family’s cow. She’s his new neighbor, and her parents have moved into a big house across the fields from his family’s place. He has never met adults like her parents before, who have a respectful and intelligent relationship with their daughter, who treat him with kindness and attention, who trust him and are interested in him, and who admire his artistic talent. Leslie becomes his best friend, and they build an imaginary world–Teribithia–together. I’m not going to say anything else. You have to read this book.
Katherine Paterson is a heavyweight: she’s won the Newbery Award twice and the National Book Award for Children’s Literature twice. She’s passionate about reading and children, and is now the national ambassador for young people’s literature. Here’s a blurb from a recent article in the New York times about her.
Ms. Paterson’s writing career has included 39 books of astonishing range, with descriptions of peasant life in 12th-century Japan, strikes by mill workers in early-20th-century Massachusetts and a refugee camp in late-20th-century Macedonia. She has published some picture books, but mainly writes for children from 8 to 14.
Ms. Paterson can spend months researching a book. For her most recent novel, “The Day of the Pelican,” which takes place partly in Kosovo, she trawled the Internet until she found a Flickr account with photos from the region and began a correspondence with the photographer, an American who had lived there and could give her details about a country she had never herself seen.
Her best-loved characters, rendered with compassion and nuance, include a defiant foster child (“The Great Gilly Hopkins”), a brooding and jealous teenage twin (“Jacob Have I Loved”), and a poor, artistic country boy who develops a unique friendship with a tomboyish girl from out of town (“Bridge to Terabithia.”)
In 2007, Gabor Csupó made a movie of Bridge to Teribithia. I never saw it. The book is too deep, too perfect in my heart. I know that didn’t stop Lord of the Rings fans from seeing their movie, but this is different. This isn’t special effects. This is emotional growth and the simple, but deep and profound, friendship between two children (and in the pictures, the kids don’t square with my mind’s imagination: they look too old; the boy playing Jess looks too mature, and the girl playing Leslie looks too feminine (in the book, kids whisper that they don’t know if she’s a boy or a girl). The book, as written, lives on beautifully in my mind.
Read the whole NY Times article here. Read more about Katharine Paterson here. Buy the book here.
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