Book Review #46 - The Hatchet

For the last few months, I have been going into Seth's classroom on Tuesdays and reading with a small group for an hour. This is exactly my kind of volunteering. We each take turns reading aloud and when the hour is up, we mark our place for the next week.

Our group, which contained five boys and myself, read The Hatchet, a book about 13 year-old Brian Robeson, who survives in the Canadian wilderness using the hatchet his mother gave him for months after the airplane he was traveling in to visit his father crashes.

I was very impressed with those 8 and 9 year-old attention spans because, after the initial crash, which is quite exciting, the book moves at a snails pace. There are lots and lots of details about Brian building a shelter and the process in which he finds food (from berries, eggs, fish to finally game meat) and Brian's own inner dialogue about what his fate will be. I particularly enjoyed the fact that the author, Gary Paulsen, uses a technique of repeating emphasis words regularly throughout paragraphs that the boys were able to pick up as a unique style that author used. It was so fun to discuss those kinds of things with these bright boys. Paulsen also included plenty of vomiting, diarrhea, animal attacks and other bits of danger to completely hook his young readers.

I admit to being a tad worried about the theme of divorce and The Secret (which turned out to be that Brian saw his mother kissing another man in a car), but was relieved to discover that it wasn't the emphasis of the book and even my sheltered and innocent Seth seemed able to handle these mature ideas.

I'm not as sure girls of the same age would like it, but The Hatchet was a hit with my 8 year old. Plus, mom liked it too.