Bridge to Terabithia was published by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1977, illustrated by Donna Diamond, and won the Newbery Medal in 1978. It is one of the most challenged books in American libraries (parents object to its treatment of death and its suggestion that good people do not necessarily go to heaven) and simultaneously one of the most beloved — a novel that has helped millions of children understand grief by experiencing it through fiction.
Jess Aarons is a fifth-grade boy in rural Virginia — poor, overlooked by his family, talented in art but afraid to show it. Leslie Burke is the new girl — confident, imaginative, the daughter of writers, different from everyone else. They become best friends and create Terabithia, an imaginary kingdom in the woods across a creek, accessible by swinging on a rope. Terabithia is their shared invention — a place where they are powerful, where imagination transforms the ordinary into the magical.
Then Leslie dies. She goes to Terabithia alone on a rainy day, the rope breaks, she falls into the swollen creek and drowns. Jess’s grief — raw, confused, characterized by denial and rage — is rendered with devastating honesty. He is angry at Leslie for dying; he is guilty for not being there; he is frightened by the finality of death; and he cannot yet understand that Terabithia — the kingdom of imagination they built together — is not destroyed by her death but is her legacy to him.
The novel was inspired by the death of Lisa Hill, the best friend of Paterson’s son David, struck by lightning at age eight.
Collecting Bridge to Terabithia
First edition (Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1977): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Signed first edition: $400–$1000
- Without jacket: $30–$60
- Later printings: $5–$15