hardcover, 288 pages
Published Jan. 12, 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR).
A middle grade memoir, giving readers a new perspective on the origins of Gary Paulsen's famed survival stories.
His name is synonymous with high-stakes wilderness survival stories. Now, author Gary Paulsen portrays a series of life-altering moments from his turbulent childhood as his own original survival story. If not for his summer escape from a shockingly neglectful Chicago upbringing to a North Woods homestead at age five, there never would have been a Hatchet. Without the encouragement of the librarian who handed him his first book at age thirteen, he may never have become a reader. And without his desperate teenage enlistment in the Army, he would not have discovered his true calling as a storyteller.
Childhood memoir, experiencing war, abuse, varieties of homelessness. I gather he's shared most of this in prior books, but a quick grim read with a love of books at the end.
