If you have ever flown over northern Canada or Alaska you know what the terrain is like. It gets cold. It snows a lot. It has lots of trees.

In hatchet, Brian Robeson, a kid in his upper teens was flying to see his dad in Alaska. The pilot of the small plane seemed fine when he got on it. When they were over the most remote part the pilot has a hart attack.
Brian is forced to fly the plane with no clue where to go. It eventually runs out of fuel. He crashes the plane into a lake and miraculously survives. His only survival tools are a hatchet and his clothes. He has to survive on his own with the winter coming. Since he flew so far off course no one knows where he is.
One of the reasons I love this book is how it is so unpredictable. You never know what is going to happen. When it described the plane crash I thought Brian was going to die. Gary Paulson made it sound like it but the he ended up barely getting by.
This is a good book because the author wrote about how Brian's parents going through a divorce and what he thought about it. It also shows how you can be thrown into a new situation and have to deal with it. Brian didn't have very many survival skills when he went into the forest.
So will he make it through the winter? Will Brian find a way to teach himself how to live in the wild? Read Hatchet, a great book about Brian and his quest to survive.