This was on a “100 best books ever written” list that I can no longer find. I did find references to it online here and there, and apparently it is a book thrown at American school children adn forced down their throats. It also won some awards, so I said fuck and read the thing. Short as it is, why not?
It isn’t a bad book. But man, is it not a good book for an adult. In light of that, I do not really think I can judge it fairly.
The book follows Brian Robeson as he survives a small plane crash and survives in the Canadian wilds until he gets rescued. You follow his as he learns about living in the wild and watch him mature in the process. For kids, sure, its fine. It feels like a book designed to teach kids how to read and appreciate novels, and in that respect reading it as an adult was a bit of a torture. Case in point: Brian’s parents are recently divorced, a fact that propels the narrative at the beginning as it is because of the parents’ divorce that Brain finds himself on the plane that crashes in the Canadian wild. As is the case with many divorces, it really is the fault of one of the parents, and in this story’s case, the culprit is the mother. When Brian reflects on the mother and the adultery she commited to provoke the divorce, the prose is written as if young Brain had survived a starring match with Cthulu.
Fucking chill my guy.
This exageration of prose continues with Brian’s adventures in the Canadian wilds. It was rather annoying.
The book is competently written. I never dosed off reading it, and I didn’t get all that bored. I did get annoyed. I would have enjoyed this book better were I roughly the same age as the protagonist. Give this book to some kid you know who isn’t reading. It might light a fire under their ass.
Failures in Polymathy 