Archive for April 3rd, 2012|Daily archive page
Hatchet (Hatchet, #1)
author: Gary Paulsen
name: Paul
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1987
rating: 1
read at: 2012/04/02
date added: 2012/04/03
shelves: childrens, novel
review:
It is my opinion that if you, as a writer, are going to take on well-tread territory such as, let’s just say, a lone survivor tale, you had better bring something new or at least interesting to the table. Take a book I read recently, The Island Of The Blue Dolphins. In that book, Scott O’Dell made his protagonist a native of the island she was stranded on, which meant that the survival element was more about loneliness, the societal compartmentalization from her gender and mental survival than about her ability to figure out how to make fire.
I guess the “twist” on Hatchet is that the survivor is a pampered, modern, TV-watching 13 year-old, but to me that was hardly enough to make this story feel unique. The other possible hook that Gary Paulsen might have had to work with was The Secret, which is the overdramatic flourish given to the fact that the hero here, Brian Robeson, knows more about why his parents were recently divorced than half his family. There might have been some dramatic, psychological territory to mine here or perhaps even a tie-in with the life-or-death struggle he’s thrust into, but Paulsen wastes it and then cheapens it by not even resolving the issue in the Epilogue.
If it isn’t really clear already, I kind of hated this book. The prose is stilted and repetitive, and while it starts of interestingly enough, the triumphs of Brian’s struggle to survive are constantly undercut by the fact that this feels incredibly familiar and the fact that, in terms of places you might find yourself having to survive on your wits alone, the Canadian wilderness in summertime is hardly the worst. He has plenty of food sources, clean water, finds an ideal shelter and he has a very useful tool in the titular hatchet. I guess it has to be somewhat believable that a 13 year-old might survive in this environment, but the problem is that believability quickly becomes a serious issue for Hatchet.
Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that Paulsen has to over-explain the presence of the hatchet in the first place. Near the climax of the book, there are two events that happen in short order that strain credibility to the point where I practically stopped reading. If I hadn’t been 170+ pages into a 200 page book, I probably would have. The author’s insistence on having Brian’s running commentary be variations on the refrain, this is insane doesn’t make up for the fact that in this case “insane” is code for “improbable and suspension of disbelief breaking.”
And after earning the dubious honor to be the first book since Michael Chricton‘s The Lost World to make me say, “Yeah, right!” out loud, Hatchet then races to a terrible climax and finale that are unsatisfying, before hand-waving the whole thing away in the rage-inducing Epilogue.
Here’s the thing about young adult fiction or children’s literature: I enjoy it, even today in my mid-thirties, and I don’t make excuses about it. Good stories are good stories, that’s how I look at it. But good writing and good storytelling should be the common thread among “adult” and young reader books, and if I’m going to accept fiction aimed at a younger audience for its successes I have to hold it accountable for its failures on those same terms. And any way I look at it, I can’t see anything in Hatchet worth recommending it, unless I start to use the qualifier, “…for a children’s book.” If you want a children’s book about survival with actual emotion and themes beyond “you’re more capable than you think,” try The Cay. As for Hatchet, give it a pass.