The Other Side of the Bridge is an accomplished successor to Mary Lawson’s widely acclaimed first novel, Crow Lake. This new novel tells the story of the Dunn family. Its two boys, Arthur and Jake, grow up on the family farm in the fictitious town of Struan in Northern Ontario in the 1920s and ’30s. Arthur is solid, quiet, and dependable, set to assume responsibility for the farm. Jake, the younger, is a good-looking schemer. During the Second World War, widower Reverend March arrives in Straun with his teenage daughter, Laura. A jealous sibling rivalry ensues as the Dunn boys are each smitten in their own way.

In the novel’s second narrative thread, set in the late 1950s, teenager Ian Christopherson struggles with the expectation that he follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become the town’s doctor. Ian develops a schoolboy crush on Laura Dunn, now Arthur’s wife and the mother of three children. He goes to work on the Dunns’ farm to be close to Laura and earn money for university. With his youthful sense of right and wrong, Ian plays a crucial role in the novel’s tragic climax.

Told in alternating chapters and using newspaper headlines from the Temiskaming Speaker to establish a sense of time, Lawson’s novel is a gradual but deft weaving together of these two plot threads. With her cast of engaging characters, Lawson subtly but surely builds the dramatic tension toward a climax that changes the lives of both the Dunn and Christopherson families.

Lawson’s story is a coming-of-age tale for two generations of young men, a community, and a country. Lawson explores the dynamics of families, the relationship between siblings, and the pleasures and pains of friendship. She probes the tensions between urban and rural and native and white communities. The novel illustrates the devastating effects of the Second World War on a small community and shows Canada’s role as a valued member of the British Empire beginning its long journey toward independence.