Synopsis:
A middle-grade memoir, giving readers a new perspective on the origins of Gary Paulsen's famed survival stories.
His name is synonymous with high-stakes wilderness survival stories. Now, author Gary Paulsen portrays a series of life-altering moments from his turbulent childhood as his own survival story. If not for his summer escape from a shockingly neglectful Chicago upbringing to a North Woods homestead at age five, there would never have been a Hatchet. Without the encouragement of the librarian who handed him his very first book at age thirteen, he may never have become a reader. And without his desperate teenage enlistment in the Army, he would not have discovered his true calling as a storyteller.
Gary Paulsen narrates his own childhood in this fascinating memoir that reads like a novel for middle-grade readers.
Five-year-old Gary Paulsen is sent alone by train to live with relatives in the mountains where he learns to fish and forage mushrooms and appreciate the simple wonders of the world. It is a dream life athat would be short lived but the skills he learned in the wilderness help him to survive a neglected childhood with his mother in the Philippines, and later, enlistment in the army.
Gary lived a childhood that most could only imagine or read about in books, having to grow up fending for himself, with the woods and the local library as his only safe spaces and finding his love of stories a little late in life but at just the right time to have his own stories to tell.
Hatchet was one of my favorite stories as a kid, next to Jean Craighead George's 'My Side of the Mountain', and it made a big impact on my childhood and helped shape my adult life so I jumped as soon as I saw this memoir. I've read a few more of his stories since Hatchet and loved seeing and making connections between the stories he has written and the story of his childhood.
I definitely recommend it if you enjoy memoirs and have read any of Paulsen's middle-grade novels, or just love the wilderness or a good survival story!
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