I’m not going to say anything that hasn’t already been said, but I’ve just read this and wanted to jot some thoughts down. These thoughts will be pretty disorganized, but I hope someone reads them and enjoys them, or is inspired to reread the book.
I first read this in third grade (a little over twenty years ago) and just this week listened to it on audiobook.
I don’t remember noticing the first time I read it how much I have in common with Jess. He’s a weird kid, and his patterns of thinking are often a bit off the beaten path. I didn’t notice at the time because I wasn’t aware of how odd I was. I didn’t have many friends, but I didn’t notice until fifth grade, which is when he seems to have noticed how much of an outcast he is. I wonder if I’d read this in my later childhood, if it would have made more of an impression on me.
I think it’s hilarious that Jess was so annoyed at Leslie for looking a bit androgynous and having a name that didn’t help him identify her gender. I wanted to shout, “Dude, your name is JESS!”
The book was recommended to me by the school librarian. I was a voracious reader and, while I wasn’t the incredible prodigy I thought I was, I was well beyond the third-grade reading level (more in vocabulary and being able to follow sophisticated sentences than in any other way). I had read The Chronicles of Narnia shortly before this (at the same school librarian’s recommendation), so I enjoyed the references to it in this novel. The author was embarrassed later on to realize that she had probably subconsciously derived the name Terabithia from the island Terabinthia in Narnia, but I think we can retcon it a deliberate homage by Leslie.
I remembered only about two scenes from the book, one being when Jess playfully squirts milk at Jess from the cow’s udder, and the other being when Jess comes home to his family informing him that Leslie died (I remembered the repeated “oh god, oh god,” and “Your girlfriend is dead, so mama thought you was dead too”). At the time, being a city-slicker and the son of a germaphobe, I was scandalized and incensed that someone would cause someone to drink unpasteurized milk; I was sure she would get sick and possibly die from it, and couldn’t believe it was being treated with such levity.
When she actually did die, I don’t remember being affected by it at the time. The school librarian asked me what I thought of it after I returned it, and I said something about it being sad, because I knew that’s what you were supposed to say about a story where someone dies, but I don’t remember being saddened by it at all. Similarly, I watched The Fox and the Hound countless times as a child (it was one of my on-repeat films), but it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I was impacted by the tremendous sadness of the story — and when it did, it was like I was punched in the gut.
I was appalled this read-through at his thought that he would be a special kid now that he has a dead friend. Then I realized that that’s exactly what I would have thought: not long after I read the book, 9/11 happened, and when I watched the endless playback of the towers falling that night, I wasn’t angry or sad, I was just intrigued that I was watching history in action. I also had to remind myself after feeling appalled toward Jess that that thought of his is about one paragraph long, surrounded by many paragraphs describing his shock and disbelief. Later, he recalls that he had that thought, and scolds himself pretty severely. All in all, definitely a realistic portrayal of grief.
I was relatively unsurprised but really worried this time when he punched his sister. I thought, she’s not going to understand, and now he’s lost the one person that could be his friend now that his former sole friend is gone. I related strongly to his feeling that he can’t apologize because this offense demands being made up for and he doesn’t have the energy to make up for it right now; that mode of correcting wrongs is one of my vices. I thought it showed great maturity that his sister didn’t turn on him for it, didn’t bring it up again, and just wanted to be with him.
I don’t know if this story prepares any child for grief. Perhaps it does, but when I read it, I hadn’t experienced any friends’ deaths. I remember crying when our elderly next-door neighbor died around that time, but otherwise, death (of other people) was a fairly abstract concept to me. My own death was something I thought about a lot, and I was (like Jess, or at least like his sisters) very afraid of hell.
But now that I’ve experienced more death, as Leslie’s death approached I felt more and more anxious. When the chapter “The Perfect Day” began, I thought, “This is definitely when she dies.” I could feel the anxiety in my body. When I get anxious, my neck and shoulders and fingers all start to wobble and my breathing quickens. I thought, as I listened, “What’s up with this? Why does the author have Leslie die? It feels so senseless, so pointless.” Afterward, I listened to an interview with the author where she explains that she wrote it for her son after his female best friend was killed by a lightning strike, and that made sense. The tragedy of Leslie’s death isn’t supposed to feel like it serves some other end, because it’s supposed to feel true to life, where our friends or our heroes or even our children die in ways that feel completely unforeshadowed and unredemptive. But we must go on.
by kipling_sapling