Review: "The River" by Gary Paulsen

The River by Gary Paulsen
Published 1991
★★★

Book 2 in the Hatchet books, which I read as book 3 because that was the order that makes sense to me. Here, Brian is asked to take on a government project—to return to the wild and show a psychologist, in real time, how he did what he did. Things go well, maybe even too well...until they don't. And then Brian has to take on a new task: get the psychologist, who is unconscious after a lightning strike, some 100 miles downriver.

As with Brian's Winter, this is an interesting addition to the series but doesn't have quite the same power as Hatchet. By this point in the series (again, book 2), Brian is an old hand at it all—anything outdoors that he sets his mind to he more or less immediately achieves. Not that I want a perfectly inoffensive character to struggle unduly, but Brian very much goes into this challenge thinking (and then executing), "okay, we need X, then Y, then Z". Might have been more realistic to put Brian in an environment he wasn't quite so familiar with and have him need to look for different kinds of berries, nuts, etc.? I'm not sure. Then again, even when Brian has to make a raft that will safely navigate two adults, one unconscious, down a river, it's nothing more than a half-day's work to him even when this is well outside his normal skill set. Maybe it would just be more realistic for a couple of months of ad-hoc survival to not turn him into an expert at all things outdoors.

Still glad to have given this series a reread, but next time I think I'd probably be okay with sticking with book 1 and then moving on to other things.