Tag Archives: young adult

Book review: Bridge to Terabithia

words and images Posted on by

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. New York, NY: HaperCollins Children’s Books. 2003. 176 pages.

If there was one thing I loved about school, it was the Scholastic Book Club. I’m not exaggerating when I say getting the Scholastic catalog and placing an order was a highlight of my childhood. I didn’t walk 10 miles through blizzards and hungry packs of wolves to school like the previous generation half-jokingly claimed, but unlike many of today’s children I didn’t have much stuff. We had neither money nor room for “junk,” as my dad would say.

When I was allowed to buy a Scholastic book, it was a treat to be savored. I had to choose carefully. Some of my favorite titles: The Snow Ghosts. Mystery by Moonlight. The Mystery of the Crimson Ghost. The Mystery in the Pirate Oak. The Mystery of the Great Swamp. The Girl Who Ran Away. The Magic Tunnel. The Arrow Book of Ghost Stories. I remembered a few others by their covers, although I can’t swear I read them: The Ghost Rock Mystery. Deadline at Spook Cabin. The Stolen Train.

I liked mysteries and stories with a hint of the otherworldly. Some ended prosaically — as with Scooby Doo adventures, the ghost turned out to be the equivalent of the creepy lighthouse keeper. Others — the ones I liked best — ventured into the child’s version of the Twilight Zone: The Snow Ghosts. The Magic Tunnel. A non-Scholastic book in this cdategory merits mention: The Secret Pencil by Patricia Ward, which tops my list of children’s books.

Some of these stories have a common theme — a child who feels like a misfit in his or environment or circumstances. The only girl in a family dominated by rowdy boys. The loner. The city boy who doesn’t know to wear rubber-soled shoes because he’s never learned how to play. The girl with imagination who wants to be a writer. If you were a child who liked to read, these stories seemed to have been plucked from your soul.

Since my Scholastic Books days, I haven’t read many (if any) contemporary children’s books, such as The Baby-sitters Club. I get the impression they’re more realistic and issues-oriented. The literatures changes with the times and sensibilities, and I imagine the newer stories appeal to more than just sensitive, lonely spirits.

Bridge to Terabithia, from 1977, seemed like a step in the evolution of children’s books from the 1960s to today. In his rural, working-class world of seasonal employment and social conformity, Jess tries to hide his artistic proclivities from his family even as he uses his limited means to nurture them. In his father’s view, real men don’t draw. In a telling simile, Paterson writes, “Jess drew the way some men drink whiskey.”

While his parents are mired in the day-to-day concerns of poverty, and his older sisters in their acquisitiveness, Jess dreams of greatness — of running, of being the “fastest, the best” so “even his dad would be proud” and “forget all about how tired he was from the long drive back and forth to Washington.” His parents yearn for the money, stability, and security that will always be beyond their reach. Jeb yearns for the recognition, approval, and love that they keep out of his.

As a swan among ducks, Jess doesn’t have many friends beyond his little sister, May Belle, to whom he is kind and cruel. “Why couldn’t he quit picking on her?” She’s the one person who looks up to him, and the one person he can dominate. She’s also a “durn lucky kid” — she gets hugs and kisses from their father while Jess looks on enviously.

That, along with a crush on a young music teacher, another swan among ducks, is Jess’s life when Leslie Burke and her parents move in next door from the city. Upper middle-class urban hippies, they’re not like anyone Jess has known. To his horror, Leslie is faster than he is — faster than any boy. Jess soon finds out that her self-absorbed mother, a writer, pays no more attention to her than his parents pay to him.

Overcoming their differences and difficulties by focusing on her experiences and his dreams, Jess and Leslie create their own world, Terabithia, where they rule. Here, they come up with schemes to “slay” one of the giants of their real life, Janice Avery. Jess, who has never been a free spirit like Leslie, can’t always maintain his kingly manner. While she appears to listen “respectfully to someone talking to her, Jess was shivering, whether from the cold or the place, he didn’t know.” She isn’t afraid to take risks. Like his parents, he is.

To me, the problem with Bridge to Terabithia is that I could not cross it. Paterson’s portrayal of the meanness of home and school life in a struggling town is detailed and devastating. Like Jess, I wanted to escape to Terabithia, but like Jess I never fully experience it. Words like “kingly” and “Spirits” and “knightly” can’t evoke emotion when used sparingly without context. I can’t share Leslie’s passion for this land over the creek or why she’d risk so much for it. Jess knows what she thinks and wants to understand what she does, but he doesn’t feel it, and neither could I.

Bridge to Terabithia’s power lies in its transformational ending, when Jess can tell May Belle, “Everyone gets scared,” and his teacher can talk about her late husband that he never imagined she had. Even Leslie’s parents come to life at last; “Bill didn’t sound like himself” as he expresses his awareness and gratitude. We see Jess in the anger phase; “she had made him leave his old self behind” but she had “failed him.” At the same time, though, there’s a hint of Terabithia’s potential — to “make him see beyond to the shining world — huge and terrible and very fragile.”

Bridge to Terabithia’s underlying gritty realism carries the book. Its inability to get beyond Jess’s limited, but growing perspective — his frustrations, his emotional poverty, and his narrow frame of reference — mutes its power.

22 July 2017
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Pagan’s Crusade

words and images Posted on by

Pagan’s Crusade by Catherine Jinks. New York: Collins. 2004. 272 pages.

I learned about Pagan’s Crusade on a medieval history list, where a poster recommended it for young adults. Pagan, a 16-year-old product of war rape who arises from the grimy underbelly of 1187 Jerusalem, finds himself desperate to join the Knights Templar for both the money and protection from the lowlifes to whom he’s indebted. Life as a Templar squire won’t be easy, he’s told. “Lord Roland’s last squire was disemboweled by the Infidel and his guts were tied across the road to the fortress,” to which Pagan mentally responds, “Hip hip hooray.”

It’s Pagan’s irreverent commentary and metaphors that may hook the young adult reader. In Pagan’s world, those who aren’t rotting from disease and poverty are rotting from corruption and cynicism, with one remarkable exception — the man to whom he’s hired himself as squire.

Like many teenagers, Pagan nicknames individuals based on their appearance, so for example the sergeant who interviews him becomes “Rockhead” (“face like a fort, eyes like arrowheads”).  When Pagan learns that his Knight Templar, Lord Roland Roucy de Bram, is a paragon of looks, strength, and virtue, he dubs him “Saint George” (“like something off a stained glass window”). If Pagan can’t stand Rockhead, he’s not too sure about Saint George, either, as they set about protecting pilgrims and then defending Jerusalem itself.

Pagan sounds like the teenager he is, but his voice is that of an alienated loner who’s come of age in the era of video games, not the twelfth century. Young adults may relate to his running, clipped commentary on everyone and everything, but I found it to be tiresome, especially as it is not leavened by a sound, suspenseful plot or even historical context. The anticlimactic, predictable denouement didn’t leave this older adult reader wanting more of this series about the “misadventures of a squire in peril,” a young man surrounded by war, violence, starvation, disease, and death who whines, “Lentils again. Terrific.”

19 March 2011
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Black Arrow

words and images Posted on by

The Black Arrow. By Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Inc., 1963. 256 pages.

With the War of the Roses as its backdrop, The Black Arrow blends the romance of young love and the excitement of its hero’s initiation into war and politics. The theme of loyalty runs throughout — loyalty to parents, guardians, leaders, followers, lovers, and oneself.

England’s loyalties are divided between Lancaster and York, although the distinction makes little difference to the country’s more practical citizens. “It is the ruin of this kind land,” a woman said. “If the barons live at war, ploughfolk must eat roots.” When the naive young hero, Richard Shelton, reassures her that men “cannot better die than for their natural lord,” another man points out, “No natural lord of mine . . . I followed the Walsinghams . . . And now I must side with Brackley! It was the law that did it; call ye that natural?”

Despite young Dick’s idealism, which makes him faithful to his guardian and to the men with whom he has served, despite many disturbing rumors, it soon becomes apparent that most men are loyal primarily to their self-interests, whether they seek power like Richard Crookback or favor and riches like Dick’s guardian, Sir Daniel Brackley. Even the mysterious “Jon Amend-All” of the black arrow, whose objective is to revenge himself and his friends on Brackley, is found collecting rents from Brackley’s cottagers, acknowledging that they will suffer the hardship of having to pay twice. The man behind “Jon Amend-All” is no beneficent Robin Hood, but as cold and crafty a political operative as Brackley himself.

Brackley’s loyalties are soon explained. “I lie in Kettley till I have sure tidings of the war, and then ride to join me with the conqueror . . . Tosspot and Shuttle-wit run in, but my Lord Good-Counsel sits o’ one side, waiting.” As Clipsby says, “For, indeed, he is one that goes to bed Lancaster and gets up York.”

Fleeing from one danger into another, Dick finally understands that he cannot trust Brackley simply because he is Dick’s guardian, or even Ellis Duckworth as his savior and protector. The only person upon whom he can rely is the girl he loves, who, ironically, was intended to be his wife in one of Brackley’s financial maneuvers. The black arrow flies from Tunstall Forest to Kettley, then through wetlands back through Tunstall to the Moat House and on to Shoreby, with treachery and the threat of war hanging over all.

With every adventure, Dick’s loyalty turns more inward on himself and his heart’s desire. He is loyal to York because Ellis Duckworth is and Daniel Brackley isn’t. When he finds himself rapidly in and out of Richard Crookback’s favor, he is “neither glad nor sorry.” Danger and treachery transform Dick into a more mature man who recognizes that loyalty is neither won nor lost so easily or quickly. In one of the novel’s strangest and weakest scenes, he proves his loyalty to his bride-to-be by rejecting the advances of her best friend, peculiar as they are.

The series of events that makes Dick a man is his theft of the Good Hope, its subsequent destruction, and the death of the captain’s man, Tom. “Dick’s heart smote him at what he heard. Until that moment he had not perhaps thought twice of the poor skipper who had been ruined by the loss of the Good Hope; so careless, in those days, were men who wore arms of the goods and interests of their inferiors . . .” Dick achieves his aims, but at the cost of many lives and the prosperity of the innocent Arblaster, who mourns “my man Tom” until the end of his days.

As a protagonist, Dick is refreshingly and painfully human, at least outside battle. While brave, he lacks the ability to pick up on clues that are obvious to his less-sheltered acquaintances, including those about the true nature of Jack Matcham. He suffers remorse for what he has done and begins to ask others like Ellis Duckworth to reconsider their course. He has the mercy that Richard Crookback and Brackley lack.

Whatever its historical flaws (some of which Stevenson points out in footnotes), The Black Arrow is beautifully written, with well-drawn characters, a plot that rarely stalls, realistically bloody battle scenes, and dialogue that is often poetic without being jarring. While not Stevenson’s greatest effort, The Black Arrow is exciting and fun for anyone of any age who loves a solid historical drama.

3 February 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf