In this novel by Gary Paulsen, there is a protagonist named Brian who has divorced parents and a will to succeed. The book starts when Brian boards a plane to fly from Hampton, New York, to the Woods of Canada where his father is living. He stays with his mother in New York during the school year and moves back to his father’s house when summer comes back around. Before Brian got on this small, single passenger plane, his mother gave him a hatchet so he can use it out in the woods near his father’s home and have something to do in the meantime. However, halfway through the plane ride, the pilot asks Brian if he would like to fly the plane a little bit. Brian initially says no but the pilot is persistent and has Brian behind the flight stick in a matter of minutes. After Brian takes control, he sits and has a flashback back to when he saw his mom cheating on his dad with some guy with short blonde hair. Then, this flashback is disturbed when the pilot mentions a pain in his left shoulder. Unaware of what is going on; Brian goes back into his trance. However, when he asks the pilot a question, he looks over and sees the pilots eyes rolled back into his head so Brian assumes the worst. The tries to take the headset off of the pilots head and tries to contact flight control but he hears nothing. Then, he points the plane’s nose down and prepares for an emergency landing. After he lands the plane as smoothly as he could in the L-shape lake he found while gliding over the Canadian forest, he swims back to shore and passes out due to exhaustion and pain. When he wakes up, he has extreme thirst and hunger so he goes out to look for food and to build a shelter. After drinking some of the lake water, he goes to look for a potential place to build his lean-on shelter. A shelter he and his best friend Terry made back in New York when they were little. He finds these red berries and eats a large portion of them. He goes and starts on his shelter but once again, falls asleep. In the middle of the night, he is woken up by a sharp pain in his foot and suddenly throws his hatchet across the clearing and discovers that a porcupine had found its way through the shelter and poked his leg. Then the next day, he wakes up and improves his fort. And by the end of the day, he makes a fire to scare off any animals and mosquitos. Then the majority of the book after that was just him thinking about things and thinking about what his parents were doing, and what his friends were doing. By the end of the book, he finds a survival package with things in it ranging from freeze-dried food packets, a rifle, and a sleeping bag. However, by the end of the chapter, Brian hers the drone of an engine above and follows it with his ears before he could actually see the plane through a clearing and he watches it as it makes its landing on the same L-shaped lake that he had crash-landed in himself.

This book for me was really interesting in the beginning and in the end when he is getting accustomed to the new way of life he temporarily has to live. He has to combat problems in the beginning but in the middle, it was a little boring because it was no longer about him living in the wild, to me it was just him combating problems with himself and him thinking too much about how his life was so much better back at home and how he missed certain things and how those things used to be. I wouldn’t really recommend this book to anyone unless they don’t have a problem with reading particularly boring novels. The end to me was only good because well, it ended. I would definitely not give this book a second read personally just because of how dull it was. The beginning was action packed, but the rest of the story had too much detail, not enough action for someone who was walking around with a hatchet. I personally was looking for a little bit more action, him killing an animal larger than him maybe. But for a book with a thirteen-year-old running around with a hatchet, it was pretty boring and a waste of time.