Hatchet

In Gary Paulsen’s Newberry Honor book, Hatchet, he shows—as opposed to tells--exactly what survival is like as he leads the reader through thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson’s mental and physical struggle for survival after his plane goes down in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.

Hatchet is one of the few, if not only, books that appears on practically every recommended reading list for boys, so I had to find out if this book is worth all the fuss. It definitely is! This realistic fiction is absolutely everything it’s cracked up to be. The book begins with the main, and pretty much only, character, Brian, in a single engine plane on his way to spend summer vacation with his father. Brian’s parents are recently divorced and he harbors a secret about why they split which sets up the internal struggle reflective of the physical struggle he’ll endure after his pilot has a heart attack and dies in mid-flight. Brian’s one saving grace comes ironically from his mother—the target for his bitterness--who gives him a hatchet as a going-away present. The hatchet is what allows Brian to survive.

For the observant reader, the hatchet and all of Brian’s harsh encounters with nature are metaphors for what Paulsen calls “the art of survival,” whether it be “getting through heavy traffic, facing an illness, or living in a rough neighborhood." Paulsen says, “The tools for survival are in all of us, just waiting to be used.” In Hatchet the reader gets to watch as Brian figures out how to dig deep and use those tools.

Paulsen crafts every detail with such painstaking patience that you feel as if you are right inside Brian’s world, the world of nature which is right under our noses and yet as unfamiliar to most of us as outer space. But Brian’s mind is as much the setting as the wilderness, and Paulsen's writing style--short, choppy, incomplete sentences--makes you feel like you're right inside his mind as he works through his challenges. Overall, the novel is crafted so carefully, you not only see it, but hear it, smell it, taste it and feel it all.

One of the greatest achievements of Hatchet is Paulsen’s ability to completely engage readers with a bare-bone plot and a one-man show. There are no glittery gimmicks or over-the-top antics. In fact, when you turn the last page and close the book, I guarantee you’ll miss Brian and his simple, but far from easy, existence in the woods. Luckily, there are several sequals to this novel. Brian's Winter, Brian's River and The Return. (Brian's winter is especially interesting because it continues the story of Hatchet as if the ending never happened).

This book is ultimately about making mistakes, rebuilding, growing, changing and healing. It is the kind of material I want shaping the minds and hearts of my boys.

Maniac Magee

Reviewed by Zach in 2007

I had to read it for SFA at school because it's a Newbery Medal book. I thought it was really good because of all the things the main character, Maniac Magee does. I like to do a lot of the same things he likes to do, like run. He’s really athletic.

The main conflict in the book was that his mom and dad died and he had to live with his uncle. His auntie and uncle hate each other but won’t get divorced because they’re Christians. So he runs away. Everybody thought he was strange because he ran everywhere and he would say hi to everyone he passed. He did all these amazing stunts that everyone thinks are so cool. Like once he ran in the middle of a high school football game and caught the ball and made a touchdown and he was so fast that no one could catch him.

He’s super good at tying knots and he’s allergic to pizza. There was a contest in the newspaper that if you untie a knot bigger than a volleyball you get a prize. He did it but the prize was pizza and he’s allergic to it so he gives it to the McNabb kids. He lives with them but they were really messy and dirty and out of control. They wouldn’t go to school. So he tells them he’ll do stunts if they went to school. He threw a rock at a telephone pole 67 time in a row. He stayed in a scary backyard for 15 minutes. All to get them to go to school.

Maniac does a lot of amazing things. When he played baseball, he hit a homerun every time. He kept getting more and more famous. My favorite part of the book was when John McNabb was playing baseball and he ran to the creek to pee real fast. He comes back with a frog and he pitches it to Maniac Magee. Maniac bunts the frog down the third base line. John McNabb had an idea to push the frog out of bounds so it would be a foul ball. But the frog kept jumping away from him and no one could catch him so Maniac made a home run with the frog.

But even though he did amazing things, he got so depressed because he doesn’t have a family so he kept running away until he found the right family, the Beals. He lives with the Beals in the East end. But the East end of town is where the blacks live. It was a book about race. One day a man came and wrote “Fish Belly go home” because he didn’t want a white boy living with the blacks. So Maniac didn’t want to cause trouble to the Beals so he ran away and started living in the deer pen in the Zoo.

I like this book a lot.