Bridges for the Young: The Fiction of Katherine Paterson (review)

"I'd like to choose Young Adult novels for my high school English students, but they just aren't deep enough." How many times have you heard this statement and its sentiment or maybe even said it yourself when contemplating changes to the standard canon of texts taught in the high school curriculum. Ever since The Outsiders was published in 1968, Young Adult literature has been waging an uphill battle to show that it is structurally complex, universal, and worthy of study for what it can reveal about human nature. Bridges for the Young, a collection of essays about the novels of Katherine Paterson, addresses this fundamental issue. These scholars and critics demonstrate that Paterson's novels hold up well to repeated readings and serious critical analysis, while at the same time they are particularly accessible to teen readers who are searching for answers to fundamental questions about how to live in a less-than-perfect world.

The editors rightly say that Katherine Paterson "needs no introduction" (1). She has received the most prestigious awards granted to a writer of children's literature: two Newberys, two National Book Awards, the Phoenix Award, the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and in 1998, the international Hans Christian Andersen Award (5). She writes in a variety of genres (contemporary realistic fiction, historical fiction, and literary fairy tales) about a wide range of subjects: friendship, loss, death, sibling rivalry, search for identity and the ways people and communities react under stress. Smedman and Chaston identify Paterson's themes as "peace, hope, and language/story" (1) and describe her as a combination realist and prophet. She captures contemporary reality and writes accurately about events in the historical past, all the while setting out to create a new vision of what is possible for humanity. Paterson has publicly declared her Christian commitment and duty "to help achieve in reality the biblical vision of a New Jerusalem, not the recovery of a lost Eden" (1). The editors call Paterson "a disturber of complacency" (1), a writer with the passion to envision possibilities of peace and hope. To her, each novel is a conversion experience, like all art, that will change the way her readers see themselves. She sees her novels as a bridge "that will take children from where they are to where they might be" (4) and the material for this bridge comes from the writer's own life.

Taking these fundamental ideas about Paterson's sense of herself as an artist and writer for children, the editors decided to use the image of a bridge to group together this collection of sixteen essays into five sections. "Bridges to the Reader: Narratology and Reader Response" explores Paterson's use of narrative, such as point of view and the way in which the reader perceives the story. "Bridges to Literary Worlds: Intertextuality and Literacy" shows how Paterson draws from a variety of literary texts in the creation of her novels and how echoes of classic texts enhance her stories. Paterson's aim to create a vision of peace that is attainable is the focus of part three, "Bridges to the World: Nature, History, and the Arts." Hope is the theme of part four, "Bridges to the Soul: Theology and Philosophy," which explores Paterson's religious response to the postmodern world. The final essay, "Building Bridges to the Young," written by Paterson for this collection, describes her desire as a novelist to build a bridge between her own experiences and those of contemporary children. Paterson believes that she can write for children because she has "good emotional memory" of the way she felt as a child, of the things that were important to her. The universal experience of love and security and language is her beginning point. It connects with similar desires...