Kids into books: Hatchet

This weeks title: Hatchet

Author: Gary Paulsen

Illustrator: Mark Taylor

Publisher: Macmillan, $13.95

Age Group: 10-13 years

The drone and the sea of green trees that lay before the plane's nose and flowed to the horizon, spread with lakes, swamps and wandering streams and rivers.

Now Brian sat, looking out of the window with the roar thundering through his ears, and tried to catalogue what had led up to his taking this flight.

The thinking started.

Always it started with a single word.

Divorce.

It was an ugly word, he thought. A tearing, ugly word that meant fights and yelling, lawyers - God, he thought, how he hated lawyers who sat with their comfortable smiles and tried to explain to him in legal terms how all that he lived in was coming apart - and the breaking and shattering of all the solid things. His home, his life - all the solid things. Divorce. A breaking word, an ugly breaking word.

Divorce.

Secrets.

No, not secrets so much as just the Secret. What he knew and had not told anybody, what he knew about his mother that had caused the divorce, what he knew, what he knew - the Secret.

Divorce.



Tomorrow: Loud and confusing.