By Katherine Paterson
Two lonely children invent a secret kingdom in the woods, and then one of them drowns.
Jess Aarons is a poor farm boy who runs to get away from a house full of sisters and a father who barely sees him. Then Leslie Burke moves in next door — fearless, bookish, unlike anyone in their small Virginia town — and the two of them become inseparable. They swing across a creek on an old rope and claim the woods on the far side as Terabithia, a kingdom where they rule and nobody else can reach them. For one good stretch of the book, Jess has a real friend and a place that is entirely theirs. Then, on a day Jess is away, Leslie crosses to Terabithia by herself. The creek is swollen from days of rain, the rope breaks, and she drowns. The last third of the book is Jess, and what he does with that.
Paterson spends the first half making Leslie and Terabithia so real and so loved that when the loss comes, it's enormous, and she doesn't rush past it. She stays with Jess through the disbelief, the guilt that he wasn't there, the flashes of anger, all the way to something like healing. Most of the earlier books here let a child feel things; this is one of the first that lets them love a character completely and then takes her away with no warning. For a child who's ready to be really moved by a book, it's one of the great ones.