13-year-old Brian, a New York boy, boarded a private plane to the northern Canadian wilderness with a heavy secret. He was going to visit his father, who worked at an oil field. While he was happy to see his father, his secret weighed heavily on his heart. As he pondered his secret, the pilot suddenly suffered a heart attack and died. The sudden and shocking turn of events left him stunned. Realizing that crying wouldn't help, he forced himself to try and fly the plane. Somehow, he managed to la...

Author Gary Paulsen takes us through teenager Brian's 2-month survival story in the remote wilderness of Canada. Although this story is often on middle-school reading lists, amazingly, I've never read it myself, so I thought I better rectify this.Positives:1. I could readily empathize with Brian's wonders, fears and accomplishments;2. being from northern Canada myself, I was quite pleased when I correctly recognized the flora and fauna Brian encountered as food sources, such as his so-called "gu...

Some books imprint themselves on your mind and stay with you. You can remember vividly where you were when you first read them. Hatchet is one of those books for me. I remember being in Mrs. Alison’s sixth grade class, and this book was raging though the male half of my class like a wildfire. Even boys who usually hated reading couldn’t put it down. Obviously, as the class’s self-proclaimed queen of the bookworms, I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. So, when a copy finally made it back...

Hatchet is a story about a young boy (Brian) struggling to survive after his plane crashes in a forest. He was traveling by airplane from the United States to Canada to see his father when the pilot suddenly had a heart attack. Brian lands the plane, but now he’s injured--and all alone with nothing but the hatchet his mother gave him. As Brian strives to find ways to survive, he learns and adapts to the new environment, but he faces many challenges with animals and the elements. Left to survive ...

3.5 stars I forgive you for eating the turtle eggs, Brian.

Read for our classics readalong series! Discussion next Friday 5/29 on the blog.

I have to be honest. At first I was having a serious 'really?' moment as I started listening. The 'really?' was because this is a three-time Newberry Award winner, and I thought the prose was way too repetitive. The same word would be repeated three times. The same sentences twice. I was steeling myself to keep listening and hope it got better. It did. By the end of this novel, I totally realized why it is a Newberry Award winner.Hatchet is a story of survival. The protagonist is a thirteen-year...

yes yes yes!! thank you to all the goodreaders who recommended this to me after my love for island of the blue dolphins became known. it turns out i love survival stories!! with teens!! and i wish i could say i never tore my eyes from the page and read this in an hour, but i have been having a distractedish day today; emailing my dad for father's day (everyone: call your dads!! or if they are at work, email-chat them!) and then there was a fire across the street from me (which is my number one a...

Though the story was compelling, very compelling, compelling enough that I finished it despite the compelling urge to throw it out the window, I don't think I could ever read it again. The window, oh the shiny window, the shiny open window was very tempting. This book was so repetitious, why so repetitious, I know not why this book was so repetitious, but the repetitions made me want to pull my hair out. My brown hair, the brown hair on my head, the hair that was brown that was on my head. I did...

What I learned from Hatchet:1. If you see a man grimacing in pain, it could be a heart attack. If this man is the pilot of a charter prop plane that you're flying alone in, you could be fucked.2. If you eat mysterious berries, they just might give you severe diarrhea. And, having just been marooned in a plane crash, you could lack the proper facilities to expel the diarrhea within. So, you could end up shitting your brains out in a cave. Since the tender age of 9, when I glanced upon the pages o...

So when I was in the 7th grade, Mrs. Randall (formerly Sr. Mary Randall, an ex-nun) FORCED this pile of garbage upon me and the rest of my unsuspecting classmates. I was an advanced reader and it was a relatively short, easy to swallow book but it took me FOREVER TO READ IT. because it was THAT FUCKING BORING. It's about this stupid snot of a kid whose parents are getting divorced (mom and dad broke up! boo-hoo :'( i'm scarred for life now!) and somehow his plane goes down in the wilderness of C...