He has high hopes for his one son, but Jess doesn’t fit into his mold very well at all. Jess wants desperately for his father to show him love and pride, but his father scorns his drawing ambitions and more so his choice to hang around with a girl. His younger sisters tag along after Jess, much to his annoyance. His older sisters both badger their parents for money and are extremely inconsiderate. His family is poor and there is a great deal of tension in his household. “He felt there in the teachers room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so.”Īnd it is a new beginning for him. Jess is embarrassed by the whole thing and angry at Leslie for ruining the one thing he liked about school.īut, he chooses to befriend her (everyone else is pretty awful to her – she looks kind of like a boy and her parent don’t even own a TV, despite being quite wealthy). Leslie Burke moves in to the rundown house next door with her parents and, on the first day back at school, she runs in the races (she’s the only girl) and beat all the boys. He’s been practicing all summer in the cow pasture and he’s pretty sure he can beat every kid there. The story follows Jess Aarons’, a fifth grade boy who loves to draw and anticipates being the fastest runner in the fifth grade when school gets back in. I can hardly type this without bursting back into tears. It didn’t hit me as quickly as it did last time, but I wept through the last ten pages.
I wondered if I’d be as affected by the ending this time, since I knew what to expect. Today, I lay on the couch and I knew what was coming. I wondered if I’d enjoy the Bridge to Terabithia book again, but was quickly sucked into the story. Our last test in my Children’s Lit class is in a few weeks and so I’ve been reading the four assigned books for the exam (Bridge to Terabithia, The Giver, A Wrinkle in Time, and Beowulf: A New Telling). The writing is so simple, so unadorned and then the ending hits you like a ton of bricks. And I even more rarely cry over books or movies. I sobbed through the last twenty pages, trying to be quiet so as not to awaken my snoozing roommate.
I’d never read it before and I only vaguely knew what was going to happen from snippets I’d heard over the years. She quickly fell asleep and I finished the whole Bridge to Terabithia book. I remember coming home from church and my roommate and I each lay down on a couch in the living room. I’d read Bridge to Terabithia in the summer of 2005.
When I read Jacob Have I Loved last year, I was disappointed in it not only because the book itself didn’t thrill me, but because it couldn’t come close to comparing with Bridge to Terabithia.
0 kommentar(er)
