Hatchet
1986
- divorce
- plane crash
- survival
- canada, fiction
- divorce, fiction
- children's fiction
- newbery honor
- juvenile fiction
- fiction
- hatchet
The story
Brian Robison, a teenage boy struggling through his parents divorce, is flying up north to stay with his dad for the summer. However, his plane crashes and he is forced to survive the Canadian wilderness. Now living in a world completely opposite of his own, he is now able to discover himself in this forsaken and misunderstood beautiful world. The story is continued in "The River" "Brian's Winter" "Brian's Return" and "The Hunt"
What it’s like
Spare, plainspoken prose that moves in short, concrete sentences, the voice of a boy noticing everything he can eat, carry, and build. The sensory world is the northern Canadian bush in summer: lake water cold enough to ache, mosquito clouds, the smell of spruce and wet moss, the sound of wind over a lake and the hum of insects at dusk, with long stretches of quiet where nothing happens but the weather changes. The mood is lonely but steady, a kind of solitary calm that tips into dread during a few sharp moments of hunger and fear, then settles back into patient, practical attention. Its violence is brief and mostly offstage, with one animal attack and a tense stretch of near-starvation; there is no gore and no sexual content. The emotional register is quiet and interior, following a teenage boy carrying a hurt he can't yet name, and his arc moves from numb anger toward a tentative self-reliance and a clearer sense of who he is. It suits a rainy afternoon, a long train ride, or a reader who wants a gentle-but-gripping survival story, especially for younger readers and anyone who enjoys wilderness solitude without graphic danger.
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