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Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia is a story for 9 year olds about a boy who spends his whole summer training so that nobody in his class can outrun him.
Jess is ten and the only boy in a house of five children. He gets up before anyone else, climbs past the scrap heap into the cow field, and runs laps round Miss Bessie while she chews and watches him. He has worked out that if he is fastest, the little ones will follow him about and his dad might wrestle on the floor the way he used to.
That is the whole plan. It lasts until the second day of term.
Leslie Burke has moved into the old Perkins place. She turns up in cut-off jeans and no socks while everyone else is in their Sunday best, asks to run with the boys, and beats the lot of them. Then again the next day, and the day after, until nobody wants to race any more.
She is also the only child at Lark Creek who does not own a television, and she says so out loud in class, which goes about as well as you would expect.
What makes it work is that these two are lonely in different ways. Jess draws, secretly, under his mattress, because the one time he told his father he wanted to be an artist it did not go well. Leslie has parents who write books and no idea how to be ordinary at a school where being ordinary is the whole game.
They end up swinging on a rope over a dry creek bed. Leslie says they need a place just for them. Somewhere secret. A whole country, with the two of them in charge, and the only way in is the rope.
Worth knowing before you hand it over, and this is the reason people remember this book. Someone dies. It is not in the opening chapters. It comes later, once your reader has properly got to know them both, and the rest of the story is about the child left behind and the family who get him through it. I am not going to say who or how. If that is a subject you would rather choose the moment for, choose it.
Smaller things too. The odd damn and a couple of ruder words. A casually unkind teacher. A boy hopelessly in love with the music teacher. And it sits firmly in 1970s rural America, with the Vietnam War just over.
None of that is a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to read the last third with your reader nearby.
For a child who takes to Jess, The Great Gilly Hopkins is by the same author and just as unsentimental. Gilly is eleven, has been through more foster homes than she can count, arrives at the newest one with gum in her hair and a plan to get straight back out again.
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