By Gary Paulsen
The pilot dies mid-flight, the plane goes down in the Canadian wilderness, and a thirteen-year-old is left to stay alive alone with a single hatchet.
Brian is thirteen and flying in a small bush plane to spend the summer with his father when the pilot has a heart attack and dies right there at the controls. Brian holds the plane level as long as he can, then brings it down into a lake deep in the Canadian forest. He crawls out with the clothes on his back and a hatchet his mother clipped to his belt before the trip. Now he has to work out fire, food, and shelter from scratch, alone, with no one coming for him. What follows is fifty-four days of failing, trying again, going hungry, and slowly getting good at staying alive. Paulsen tells it in short, hard, fast chapters.
This is about as intense as survival stories get for this age, and none of it cheats. No magic, no lucky rescue, no adult stepping in at the last second. It's just Brian, his nerve, and one tool, solving one life-or-death problem after another. That's the whole draw for a child who wants a pounding heart with nothing supernatural in it. It's also short and moves fast, which is why it's a famous first-real-book for readers who swear they hate reading. I'd hand it to the child who'll grind at a video game for an hour but won't sit still for two pages. Just know it goes to some dark places, covered in the heads-up, so it wants a sturdier reader.