Just a few walks away from Jesse’s house reside the Burke family – Bill and Judy Burke and their 10 or 11-year-old daughter Leslie. But, he doesn’t get it, what he gets in fact is quite the opposite a cold shoulder, from his sisters, from his busy parents. I don’t think Jesse wanting a little affection and care shown to him by his parents and sisters is too much to ask. There are several prominent themes in ‘ Bridge to Terabithia’ – but I’d like to think the theme of friendship – being one of them – is the connecting dot through which author Katherine Paterson explored most of the other themes.įrom the start of the book, the reader finds Jesse Aarons feeling alone and uncared for – despite being a member of a large family of seven.

With a little over 200 pages and the choice of words used, ‘ Bridge to Terabithia’ is one novel anyone who loves a good story can grab and finish within a few hours. Katherine Paterson’s ‘ Bridge to Terabithia’ is one of the easiest, simple-to-read books I’ve read. From there, it’s easily a joyride straight through memory lane. One immediately gets on the same page as the book from the first flipping of the covers. When I read the book at 10 or 11, it was frightening and absorbing precisely because Leslie’s accident felt unexpected, random, senseless.To readers, ‘ Bridge to Terabithia’ can be a magnetic book in that it touches deeply on the inner child in all of us by picturesquely describing the feelings and events those moments of childhood presented. Until the day the rope snaps and she falls to her death. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where “someone long forgotten had hung a rope.” They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic.

In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. “I was trying to make sense of a tragedy that made no sense,” Paterson says in this interview with Christianity Today. Katherine Paterson wrote the 1977 children’s classic Bridge to Terabithia after her son David’s best friend, Lisa Hill, died at age 8 after being struck by lightning.

The bridge to terabithia novel