The River by Gary Paulsen
My rating: 3/5 cats
brian is such a tool. only maybe it’s not brian’s fault, maybe it’s gary paulsen’s fault for really trying to determine the limits of a reader’s tolerance. i am comfortable with suspending disbelief—i watched lost well past the comfort point because of some innate need to see something through to its end (thanks, dad!). that impulse applies here as well—i will read all the books in this damn series because, like kasia, i can’t NOT read them. fortunately, these only take about an hour to read, and they do feed my greedy survivalist bug, so there’s somewhat of a purpose to it all.
however. i have to call “bullshit.” Hatchet i can understand: small plane—pilot has heart attack—brian is stranded in the wilderness with nothing and must learn to live in the wild. awesome. this one: brian is in a different wilderness with a man who works for the government to re-enact the experiment for the benefit of psychology and its applications etc. etc. and then lightning strikes old government johnny and he goes into lightning coma (this is all on the back of the book, relax) but really?? lightning?? brian, there’s a point where you have to stop and think that maybe you’re the bad seed in these scenarios. maybe just being near you leads to disaster, and the wilderness is the best place for you, where you can’t destroy anybody else. think about it.
but at least there is this:
Out here, in nature, in the world, food is everything. All the other parts of what we are, what everything is, don’t matter without food. I read somewhere that all of what man is, everything man has always been or will be, all the thoughts and dreams and sex and hate and every little and big thing is dependent on six inches of topsoil and rain when you need it to make a crop grow—food…that’s all i did—think about food. You watch other animals, birds, fish, even down to ants—they spend all their time working at food. Getting something to eat.That’s what nature is, really—getting food. And when you’re out here, having to live, you look for food. Food first. Food. Food.
and me, stuffed on french toast and grapefruit, would have to agree.
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