Synopsis
To escape the pressures of suffocating parents and a possessive girlfriend, seventeen-year-old Piers takes a job as a keeper of a toll bridge and its cottage. There he befriends Adam, a charismatic wayfarer who shows up one day and refuses to leave. He also befriends a girl named Tess, and soon he and Tess find themselves strangely attracted to Adam and falling under his spell. The three test their sexuality and the bonds of their friendship as they discover who they are—and aren’t—in a harrowing course of events that leaves all three wondering if you can ever really know anyone.
Like the other books in The Dance Sequence, The Toll Bridge can be read alone or as part of the series.
The ALAN Review
A marvelous wordsmith and magical storyteller, English author Aidan Chambers has again written a compelling novel that sophisticated adolescents and their mentors will love. As in his previous books (Breaktime, Dance on My Grave, and N.I.K.: Now I Know), Chambers dazzles readers with exciting sentences and paragraphs that snap, crackle, and pop. He's especially talented in creating dialogue among witty teens who clearly cherish language as much as he does. In The Toll Bridge, protagonist Piers has left his overbearing family and girlfriend to go to a rural area and tend a toll bridge, living alone in an adjacent cottage. There he meets Tess and, later, the mysterious Adam, and this threesome becomes enmeshed in a drama that leaves them - and readers - more than a bit breathless. I recommend this book highly. It is splendid.