I will be honest: I didn't really enjoy this book. And I even had high expectations because it's the recipient of the Newbery Honor.

I had just read “The Life of Pi” a few weeks ago and enjoyed it immensely despite its otherwise relatively boring, dialogue-less narrative – one that can be expected from a book about a shipwrecked teenage boy (albeit with a Bengal tiger for company). This children's book, Hatchet, had a similar plot: thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson was on his way to see his father in Canada when the single-engine plane that he was riding on plummets to a lake in the Canadian forests, and he is forced to try and survive on his own – with only the hatchet that his mother had given him for company (if you could call it that). He spends more days in the wilderness than he would have wanted to, so in that sense, he and Pi share a lot in common.

But the similarities stop there, in my opinion. Whereas Pi was so engaging and well-written, Hatchet bored my mind silly. There were times that I was even skeptical about what Brian had supposedly done in order to survive; to me, it just didn't seem possible for a 13-year-old to have done things like that in real life. The book just made everything about foraging and hunting and living in the wild seem so easy when they, of course, are not.

I'm hoping I'll enjoy Gary Paulsen's other books. I still have several in my TBR.