Book Chop: Brian's Winter (Hatchet)

Title: Brian's Winter (Hatchet #3)
Author: Gary Paulsen
Genre: Young adult survivalist fiction
Verdict: A flagship among books for young boys.

It feels like I might have Chopped this book before. There's a good chance I don't care, because I'm lazy and I just finished reading it to my fiancee this evening. I loved Paulsen's Hatchet books--they are so simple and yet so amazing. If there's another series like it out there for young readers, I am not aware of it and anticipate being unimpressed.

The first book in the series, HATCHET, is about 13 year-old Brian Robeson, who is traveling on a small plane to visit his father in Canada. The pilot of the single-prop Cessna has a heart attack mid-flight, and crashes the jet into a lake in the middle of nowhere. Brian has to rely on his wits and just one tool: a hatchet, given to him as a parting gift from his mother. He has a really cool adventure and learns lots of great survival tricks, and is eventually rescued at the end of the summer.

The sequel, THE RIVER, is about how a government agency wants to take Brian back out in the wilderness to learn what he knew. To keep it realistic, Brian insists on no survival gear and only one agent to accompany him. A storm comes through and the agent gets struck by lightning and falls into a coma. Brian must then build a raft and navigate it down a river for a hundred miles.

BRIAN'S WINTER is an alternate ending to HATCHET, wherein Brian wasn't saved during the summer and had to keep going into winter. What do I love about it? Well, for one thing it's a great classic adventure. It's positive and uplifting, while being realistic and also showing us city folks what nature is really like. There's the "romantic view" of roughing it with the "true view" of the dangers one faces in the wild.

Paulsen is a great writer, too--he mentions in the foreword that he researched the topic prior to writing the book, but he didn't just plug Brian's character into his survival notes. Brian's still a real character, and the little insights into his mind help to pull you into the story, especially at the end when he's rescued, and he's come to actually love living in the woods. He even considers it "play" in a sense, and he's become a part of nature that way. It makes me long for that romantic side of it, but not so much that I'd want to tolerate the cold and suffering the way Brian did.

There are more books in the series, that I definitely want to read. I'll post the reviews as I get them. Highly recommended.