Jesse Aarons already feels like an outsider at his school because he likes Art more than he likes sport, despite being more than capable of holding his own in the running races that obsess his classmates. When Leslie Burke arrives and becomes an unlikely best friend, he finds a new zest for life… because someone finally believes in him enough to stand by him. Jesse and Leslie create their own magical kingdom from their own imaginations, a stronghold where they can ignore the problems and hassles of the outside world and just be the true friends they are for each other. Then tragedy strikes…
Katherine Paterson was already an established writer when this novel was published in 1977. However, it changed the trajectory of her career in ways that most midlist authors can only dream of. Bridge To Terebithia won the Newbery Medal in 1978, has been adapted (twice) for the screen and is also a musical.
The story of Jesse and his friendship with Leslie is based on a true story: that of the friendship between Paterson’s son David and Lisa Hill, a little girl who was tragically struck by lightning on a beach in Delaware in 1974. She was eight years old.
The story of Jesse and Leslie is also incredibly touching and fiercely real. It’s the story of a friendship, of true friends who meet, discover a kindred spark between them and forge a bond that should last a lifetime. Because of their age and situation (they are pupils at a small country school in the US), they face a lot of derision from other students, and from members of Jesse’s family. But they are true to each other over the course of this novel and discover that they can change things in their lives for the better just by supporting each other. Jesse also learns that other people – not necessarily people he would consider friends – can have importance to him as well, and he to them.
Jesse is sensitive and cares about things in a different way to the people around him. He believes that his father is already judging him to be weak or “different”, and that his sisters – Jesse is the only boy amongst his siblings – have nothing but contempt or disinterest for him. He has few friends, or even acquaintances, among his peers at school, and usually feels like an outsider, bewildered by what happens around him.
The first chapter describes Jesse’s life perfectly: he’s the only boy in a family of girls, desperate to win back the approval and love that he thinks he has lost from his father. He’s also thinking hard about what things are going to be like when he gets back to school and what his position in the pecking order will look like, as well as the fact that he feels self-conscious about it being so dominant in his life. We meet his superficial older sisters and his immature younger sisters, one of whom idolizes him in what he considers to be an embarrassing way. And we learn that he feels hard done by in the amount of work he has to do compared to other members of his family.
When he returns to school, he’s depressed at the crushing banality of what he has to endure for the next eight years of his education but he’s also looking forward to the seeing Miss Edmunds, the Music teacher, again. She’s not from the local area, nor does she behave like someone who is: Jesse sees her as a sophisticated woman slumming it in the provinces but who also spies something of a kindred spirit in himself: she’s the only person he’s shared his art with, for one thing, and she encourages that side in him, which only makes him worship her all the more, despite his peers and other adults around him being disapproving of her.
And when Leslie arrives she shakes his life up even further: she and her family are Jesse’s new neighbours but he’s painfully aware of the potential social cost of being her friend. However, he quickly learns that being friends with her may just be worth it…
I don’t remember when I first read this book: I know I was in high school and that I was probably in Grade 7 or 8. I had just inhaled the Chronicles of Narnia over the previous few months, so the title – which bears a passing similarity to a minor kingdom mentioned in Prince Caspian and visited in The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader – may have piqued my interest. For whatever reason, I was never the same again: it was one of the first books I had read that dealt with death in a way that wasn’t maudlin or melodramatic. It also set me along a long road of appreciating the value of my friends in a way that I hadn’t previously.
I related completely to Jesse. I don’t know why: I was never athletic, nor particularly good at art, and I didn’t have the sort of personality that made people want to be particularly close friends with me for very long. But I totally understood his feeling of alienation, despite not knowing what that word meant either.
Things weren’t really that bad for me at the same age, but I was developing interests in things that not a lot of my peers seemed interested in and frequently felt the same way as Jesse about the pursuits of those around me: that they were fascinating and important to getting along, but not necessarily to me. I was also aware that people who were not my friends seemed to be concerned with me continuing to not be their friend but also making sure that I didn’t step outside what they thought was “normal,” despite them having no other interest in my existence. There were a lot of things about life that baffled me but I knew that a lot of other people felt that they were important and since they had much more force of personality than I did, they became important to me as well. I’d met plenty of people like Leslie as well and, thankfully, continue to do so; people who come into your life, shaking things up without necessarily meaning to, but creating a fizz that hadn’t been there previously.
But it wasn’t until many years after I’d read this book that I realized I’d had a bunch of Leslie’s around me all along: people who supported me and believed in what I was doing; people who believed in standing up for what was the right thing to do; people who knew that some things were worth a bit of social isolation. Because they bring your interactions with the world into sharper focus, making them more meaningful, making their friendship even more valuable because these wonderful people have, for some strange reason, seen something of worth in you. And that worth makes you want to continue being friends and remaining worthy.
And, when tragedy strikes and you lose those friends, you have to be like Jesse and find ways to memorialise them and keep going on with your life in a way that honours them. Jesse finds that he has become more accepting of those around him and is more prepared to make inroads against his normally quiet nature in order to support those around him. After all, he began to stand up for Leslie in part because she made the rest of the world look a little crazy in comparison, despite desperately wanting to be a part of that world himself. And he also learned that sometimes you have to stick up for people or ideas that you find disagreeable because they help make the world somehow better. And that doing this is easier with friends to remind you of the purpose behind it.
She also understands what it is that makes him different and cultivates it, making him more able to use those differences to get along with others. Like the best of those around us, she makes him a better person, while keeping his core personality the same.
Like Jesse, I loved the new perspectives on life that these friends brought into my world. But I loved – and still love – my friends even more.
You can find out more about Katherine Paterson at https://katherinepaterson.com/
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