Bridge to Terabithia

My Sketch of a still from the movie "Bridge to Terabithia"

Bride to Terabithia is not a new book but I came across it from one of the movies that I
borrowed from my friend with the same name.

It’s a children’s book, but I can hardly portray myself reading it at an age of ten or so. Perhaps the simple sentence and the fact that two main characters of the story are ten years old found its way in the kid’s section.

It was silly to rush through the children’s section to get a copy of the lost book that even the shopkeeper didn’t hear of but found its record on the computer. At last when I found it, it was as if a kid has achieved his imaginary feat of finding a staircase to moon or something like that.

Reading it as an adult, I most likely see much deeper then what the book said and read more between the lines or perhaps my experience made it a masterpiece. The author, Katherine Paterson eloquently portray the feeling of a ten year farm-boy Jess and his struggle for being difference and coming terms with life, and its counter part death.

The book mainly deals with sweetness of innocent childhood friendship and vivid imagination that Jess discovers through the friendship of his new friend Leslie Burk. A beautiful
person from deep within, who entails to save the whales and support Jess’ Drawings. Together they create an imaginary world, where they play King and Queen of an enchanted land and fight off the intruders of their peaceful land.

The simple friendship between two ‘weird’ people, as there class-mates say, is so sweet
that it do carry us in their enchanted land and make us cross the bridge from what we try to be and what we really are- the true us.

To reach their land they must swing over a ditch, in spring it fill up with torrent of muddy
water and threatens to destroy the peace of Terabithia by taking life of Leslie, and Jess must face the tragedy.

The way Jess faces it is remarkable, it did put its enchanted spell on me and I wept. I wept out of sorry, but also out of profound respect for Jess.

I am enlightened enough to know that it was a work of fiction, but the book is so well rendered that it makes me believe that sometimes fiction is more true then the reality itself.

This short novel; friendship of two kids who are almost ten years younger to me have made a great impart on my life. Made me look back on my own childhood, indeed I was also one of the unfortunate ‘weird kids’ who find no one of his genre in class and live on with the flow and accept the direction in which it carries it. Suppressed by everyone who know, special synonyms curse… and being different seems to be an out-cast.

Well! That’s a different story, but how nicely is it all portrayed in the book seems mind-blowing to me. A must read. The movie is equally good, it does focus a little more on the imaginary world and out of the book content, but do produce an enchanted hex, that keeps us spellbound.