hatchet

Title: Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

Genre: Censored

Annotation: Armed with only a hatchet from his mother and haunted by the divorce of his parents, a boy must survive the wilds of Canada.

Review: Anyone who has ever witnessed the breaking up of one’s own parents’ marriage can certainly empathize with Brian Robeson’s angst over his mother’s infidelity (the secret) and his folks’ recent divorce. However, everyone can relate to his struggle to stay alive in the harsh Canadian wilderness after the pilot of the plane ferrying Brian to his father suffers a heart attack and leaves Brian to crash land the aircraft into one of the lakes that dot the unpopulated area. For better or worse, Brian survives the harrowing accident with only a small hatchet that his mother had given him for working with his father in the wilderness.

The description of surviving the crash was poignant, and it was replete with sensations basic to the human condition: pain, thirst, hunger, fear. Civilized man – or boy – was thrust into raw nature where he had to find the wherewithal to fend for himself and adapt to nature’s elements and attend to his body’s needs in order to survive. Remembering one of his former English teachers named Perpich, Brian attempted to stay positive and “get motivated” at the beginning of his fifty-four day adventure in the remote Canadian woods. Brian goes on to find shelter, locate food, face a bear, make fire, survive a tornado, and ultimately gain the strength to swim to the sunken plane, find a locater beacon and facilitate his own rescue.

Hatchet is a study in strength, whether physical endurance or the emotional fortitude to face one’s internal demons and fears. For instance, Brian found the inner strength to remain relatively calm after the pilot fell into unconsciousness. Luck or serendipity also played a role in the story. Brian was “lucky” that the pilot had given him a brief piloting lesson just before crash landing. Brian was also lucky when he found a lake in which to land the plane, a shelter that had been conveniently scooped out by glaciers past, various wilderness foods, and (lastly) the ultimate recovery of the survival packet that led to Brian’s rescue. Moreover, through his ordeal in the wilderness by the lake, Brian also learned the most important rule of survival: feeling sorry for oneself doesn’t work. And yet through this test of strength, of will, he had “died and been born as the new Brian.” In fact, it was this metamorphosis that ultimately allowed Brian to come to terms with the divorce, the “breaking word.”