Reading Letter 4- Kelley

Book: Hatchet

Author: Gary Paulsen
Pages: 177/177

I have read this book before and didn’t like it very much, but I read it again because I had nothing else to read. It is about a boy named Brian who was going to see his father when the small plane he was riding in crashed in the Canadian wilderness. After the pilot had a heart attack, Brian took the controls of the plane and landed it in a lake. Brian is not very educated on how to survive the wilderness, he only knows the bare basics. Brian eventually finds all the food he needs, raspberries, fish, turtle eggs, birds, and rabbits when he can catch them. The thing that Brian survives on though, is the Hatchet his mother gave him before the plane ride, just in case he needed it. The hatchet helped him make bows, arrows, and a spear. Later in the book, a tornado hits Brian’s shelter and destroys everything he has made. But the tornado also brought the plane wreckage closer to the surface. Brian then builds a raft and goes to get supplies from the plane. He finds a transmitter and some food packs (which I don’t know how the transmitter could ever work when it had been underwater for so long). Brian uses the transmitter and eventually somebody comes to rescue him.

I thought this book had a good plot, but I didn’t really like the writing style. The sentences were choppy, a lot of them only contained two words. To me, books are kind of hard to read when sentences go from long to short because the speed of your reading depends of the length of the sentence. I also wonder how the transmitter from the plane worked when it had been underwater for such a long time. Brian also ate the food in the food packs, which in real life would have been really nasty. I did like the general plot of the book, though. If you like survival stories, then I would recommend this book.

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