It was a book, to be frank, that I shied away from, as a kid. As a kid, I wanted real fantasy. What that means is, I wanted fantasy where the astonishing worlds the characters go to are tangible, and the monsters they fight draw blood, and the heroes they become reach that status because they defied death, not because they surrendered to it.
I remember sitting in front of the TV and watching the trailer for this movie where a sad-looking dark-haired boy meets a shimmering golden-haired girl and together they go on an adventure into a land called Terabithia, where the trees walk like giants. I liked Narnia, then, as well as The Lord of the Rings and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain and Harry Potter and a bevy of suchlike tales, and I was intrigued by Terabithia because the trailer’s images reminded me of them.
And I clearly remember being disappointed when I learned about the book that the movie was based on, and about how Terabithia wasn’t, in fact, “real.” Terabithia was just a place imagined by the children. I remember being disappointed, and also, in a way, betrayed: what kind of children’s author would dress up their story as something it wasn’t? Who’d strangle the fantasy in its crib and then morbidly parade it around like an effigy?
I didn’t know that I’d conflated the marketing of the movie with the book, and I didn’t appreciate that sometimes kids’ books can talk about things deeper than the make-believe even while, at the same time, engaging with it. Books like that bored me, then. I wanted dragons and spell-casting and high romance; and, if events had to be set in the un-magical world we plodded through day by day, than there had to be, at the very least, thrilling hijinks with larger-than-life characters and circumstances. Sammy Keyes solving mysteries, or Alex Rider toppling criminal syndicates.
Of course I knew that Narnia and Middle-Earth and Hogwarts weren’t “real.” Of course I knew that kids made up places for fun, in order to escape the mundane trappings of life. But the point of literature, to my young mind, was to indulge in the play-pretend. So why would I ever want to associate with this claptrap about some fake fantasy?
Biases, I suppose, set in early. It’s hard to blame my kid-self for this because kids are like that: they enjoy what they enjoy for reasons mostly unfathomable to them, and it’s those reasons that motivate their behaviors and lead them to judgments which, in most instances, age must eventually amend. You grow up, and your reason changes in the process, and even as the world dulls a little due to certain disillusionments, certain depths become accessible, in turn. It is by venturing into these depths that you learn to better accommodate literature’s, and life’s, multivarious quality.
It’s sad, because I would’ve benefitted from a book like Bridge to Terabithia if I’d had the chance wisdom to read it as a kid. Many other kids have, and I regret that it was my choice (not totally my fault, but my choice, all the same) to limit myself to the sensationalisms of genre when books like Katherine Paterson’s had other things to offer.
I don’t know if he would’ve understood it in the way a twenty-seven-year-old does, but perhaps my much younger self, so glutted on the fantastical, might’ve read this…
His body was begging him to quit, but Jess pushed it on. He had to let that puny chest of his know who was boss.
…and related it to the growing sense of his own smallness. Perhaps he might’ve taken Jess Aarons’s self-admonition as encouragement to test himself physically, rather than surrender, as he so quickly did, to easier impulses like rest and appetite, which together formed their own kind of escapism.
There was something about Jess’s resolve to become the fastest runner in his grade he might’ve admired, if also envied. Jess’s budding artistry, too: did he not pen silly little stories in his head like Jess did quirky illustrations in his journal?
And what about Leslie Burke? No personality so luminous had ever asserted itself in his life as Leslie’s does into Jess’s—partly because there never seemed to be much time for such things to occur—but he likely would’ve understood this…
He heard her say “Jess” once, but the bus was noisy enough that he could pretend he hadn’t heard. When they came to the stop, he grabbed May Belle’s hand and dragged her off, conscious that Leslie was right behind them. But she didn’t try to speak to him again, nor did she follow them. She just took off running to the old Perkins place. He couldn’t help turning to watch. She ran as though it was her nature. It reminded him of the flight of wild ducks in the autumn. So smooth. The word “beautiful” came to his mind, but he shook it away and hurried up toward the house.
…right away. He was already piqued to perceive, and disciplined to reject, physical beauty, although maybe on different terms than Jess’s, since that other boy’s attentions are simpler—purer, even—than his.
As for Terabithia itself, he already understood the ways of make-believe. He understood the need to keep such things secure from the privations of grown-up scrutiny:
Terabithia was their secret, which was a good thing, for how could Jess have ever explained it to an outsider? Just walking down the hill toward the woods made something warm and liquid steal through his body. The closer he came to the dry creek bed and the crab apple tree rope the more he could feel the beating of his heart. He grabbed the end of the rope and swung out toward the other bank with a kind of wild exhilaration and landed gently on his feet, taller and stronger and wiser in that mysterious land.
You can become something entirely new in a world you created. Physics cannot shackle you, there; neither can social norms. You can do what you like, and look the way you want to look, and people might regard you with real adoration in that ulterior form. Yes, this he understood, and was already practicing: creating worlds in play and granting himself special powers, and making up stories where he and his siblings performed heroic feats for no one’s enjoyment but theirs.
What of the novel’s nadir, and the intrusion of grief?
When it arrives in Bridge to Terabithia, there is hardly any preparation for it. It happens quite suddenly. The seasoned reader is, by all means, welcome to critically detach themselves, to interrogate its appositeness to the book’s overall quality. But sometimes, it really does happen like that, and there is no preparation, because how can you adequately prepare for a loss you can’t see coming?
Thankfully, for the detached critic, Paterson does not allow the story to wallow in predictable emotions for very long. Another, less attentive, writer would not have included this unexpected cruelty, after Jess has partitioned away his trauma as one might a nightmare:
“You don’t even care. Do you?” Brenda was watching him from across the table.
He looked at her puzzled, his mouth full.
“If Jimmy Hicks died, I wouldn’t be able to eat a bite.”
The coldness curled up inside of him and flopped over.
“Will you shut your mouth, Brenda Aarons?” His mother sprang forward, the pancake turner held threateningly high.
“Well, Momma, he’s just sitting there eating pancakes like nothing happened. I’d be crying my eyes out.”
Ellie was looking first at Mrs. Aarons and then at Brenda. “Boys ain’t supposed to cry at times like this. Are they, Momma?”
“Well, it don’t seem right for him to be sitting there eating like a brood sow.”
“I’m telling you, Brenda, if you don’t shut your mouth….”
He could hear them talking but they were farther away than the memory of the dream. He ate and he chewed and he swallowed, and when his mother put three more pancakes on his plate, he ate them, too.
Would he have related to this scene, my younger self? Maybe not. Tears came very easily to him. But to mourn for another? That was new, and would be difficult to feel, he’d figure, if the reason for such grief was properly recognized. You can’t cry, after all, for something you can’t let yourself understand. (Death, to this day, remains a little distant from me. How grateful should I honestly be?)
And the ending? I have to admit, it’s a strange feeling, or mixture of feelings, when contemplating the conclusion of Bridge to Terabithia. It makes sense, however, to engage with the fantastical, a technique flourished often enough when reality remains stolid to one’s attempts to parse out its affect:
I picture myself—my child self, that is—being given a window into the future, and seeing the person he will become seated in a café, somewhere far away from everything he knows. That older person is reading the book the younger has just refused, because he feels he is ready for it, now. The place is crowded and noisy but the moment is silent. He is witnessing, in those closing pages, a series of gifts: some from the living to the living, and one from beyond, to give to those who are not yet at the threshold; who are, in many ways, unprepared, and thus susceptible to such a conveyance.
The younger one will see the elder be compelled to close his eyes. Maybe he is puzzled by this, or scandalized, even: why would a grown man let himself be taken by emotion in the middle of a crowded and noisy café? What if people saw? The real world isn’t make-believe; you have to follow certain rules. Grown-ups, better than anyone, know this. And what was so special about that book, anyway? Nothing really happens in it. Nothing, at least, that matters.
The younger one will turn around, in his all-knowing ignorance, and the elder will draw away from the precipice, reminding himself of what is real and what is not. Neither, of course, will ever quite understand the true nature of the gap between them, a gap deeper than what years erode. Such measures elude immediate knowledge, and are spannable only by effort of the imagination, which on its own can bear the weight of memory.
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More from Ezekiel Yu: Between Two Lives, a Dream: Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” (2023), Limit & Mist: On Béla Tarr’s “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000), Creation, Here and Now: on Henry Beston’s “The Outermost House” (1928)