Review: "Brian's Winter" by Gary Paulsen

Brian's Winter by Gary Paulsen
Published 1996
★★★

This is book 3 in the Hatchet books, but I skipped ahead because in my fuzzy memories of childhood, this was the second of the books that I read, and it's a more direct follow-up to Hatchet.

Brian's Winter reimagines the end of Hatchet: instead of the survival supplies Brian pulls out of the submerged plane leading to his rescue at the end of summer, they improve his odds—but he's still lost in the wild when summer rolls into autumn and then into winter.

While still a reasonably gripping read, this one felt a bit more "checklist" to me than Hatchet. By the time winter rolls around, Brian is confident in his abilities; he's justifiably worried about winter, but pretty much every time a concern comes up he thinks about it and finds a way to solve it. Perhaps that's partly because this is so short a book, with less character development and so on than the first one; it's also not one that I'd want to read without the context of the first book. But as a nostalgia read, I'm on board.