Imagine you are thirteen years old, riding shotgun in a Cessna, and your pilot suddenly loses consciousness. What do you do?

I recently revisited Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (1987, 208 pages), a book that has stayed with me since childhood. It is a page-turning, heart-stopping adventure As a proponent of buying used books, I smiled when my copy arrived bearing a middle school barcode and pages filled with tabs and class notes. It served as a perfect reminder of the impact this story has on young readers.

Hatchet is a riveting tale of survival and transformation. The story follows thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson, who is stranded in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash leaves him as the sole survivor. Equipped with nothing but a windbreaker and a hatchet, Brian must move past despair to learn essential survival skills. As he adapts to his environment, he also grapples with the emotional weight of his secret knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, while traveling by single-engine plane to visit his father for the first time since the divorce. When the plane crashes, killing the pilot, the sole survivor is Brian.

Reflecting on Brian’s journey as an adult, I find myself thinking about our responsibilities as parents. Life is unpredictable; while we cannot protect our children from every setback, we can equip them with the independence and resilience needed to navigate challenges. In an age where many children are engulfed in technology, I wonder how they would fare in the wilderness on their own.

This Newbery Honor-winning classic remains the standard for survival stories. I believe it would be an excellent book for parents and children to read together to spark conversations on self-sufficiency. After all, teaching a child to navigate their own “wilderness” is a gift that lasts a lifetime.