"Surviving" Summer Reading

Kasey Cox

While the kids, parents, and teachers are counting down the last few days of school, bookstores and libraries are getting ready for the influx of questions about books for summer reading. Most kids have summer reading that they’re “supposed to” do, whether by parental encouragement or by teacher mandate. For the lucky kids, this summer reading is not a chore, because they’ve discovered the joy of the reading. For other students, reading is more difficult, but I’m a firm believer that people just need to find a story that interests them. One of the first questions I ask reluctant readers is: “What do you like? What are you most interested in?” I don’t mind if the answer is a game or a TV show, since we can still work with that. I want to know what they like about that story – because there’s the hook.

One book which reigns high on the list of hooks for reluctant readers is Gary Paulsen’s young adult novel, Hatchet. This Newbury Honor book had its 20th birthday in 2007, and at that point, it had sold over 4.5 million copies. Hatchet is the story of Brian, a teen boy whose parents have recently divorced. He’s headed to northern Canada to spend the summer with his father, a mechanical engineer working with oil companies in remote locations. For the last leg of the trip, it’s just Brian and the pilot of the little Cessna. They crash. Brian has next to nothing to use for survival, except a hatchet. It’s a great story, the kind of story many of us find ourselves caught up in, whether it’s Tom Hanks marooned in the movie Castaway, or silly old TV series like Gilligan’s Island, or more gruesome events from history like the Donner Party. We like survival stories – adrift at sea, settling the prairies, captured as a prisoner of war, crashing in the mountains.

We’re lucky, then, to have so many stories like this to read (even if the people in the stories aren’t always so lucky). History itself is filled with such stories, especially American history, as our ancestor immigrants carved out new lives in harsh, strange places. And then there are the people who like to live even closer to the edge, the mountaineers and the extreme sports enthusiasts. In searching for more stories like this, I recently found Norman Ollestad’s memoir, Crazy for the Storm. Norman’s experience at age 11 reads like a version of Paulsen’s Hatchet. The book opens with the crash scene – Norman, 11; his father, 43; Dad’s girlfriend, Sandra, 30; and the pilot of a little Cessna, crash into the San Gabriel Mountains in California during a storm. At 8,600 feet, on steep slopes of almost shear ice, Norman is the only one left uninjured. His father and the pilot are dead. Sandra is gravely injured. It’s snowing. I won’t tell you the details that Norman relays in what people are lauding as beautiful, terse, Hemingway-esque prose, chapter by chapter, as he got down the mountain. I will tell you I couldn’t put the book down. I honestly read it in one sitting, from the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon until late that night. I had to know how he did it.

Norman attributes his survival to his relationship with his father. In alternating chapters, this well-crafted memoir takes 11 year old Norman down the mountain, and relates growing up with his father who was constantly pushing him to surf, ski, play hockey, and hike remote areas almost as soon as he could walk. I have to admit, at first I was annoyed with the chapters reminiscing about younger life with Dad, living on the infamous Topanga Beach in the 1970’s, a crazy drive through Baja California. I wanted to get back to the mountain survival chapters. As I continued to read, however, I realized that young Norman’s experiences with his father – from being strapped to his father’s back as a toddler while Dad went surfing, to being ferried constantly to black diamond ski slopes for competitions – WERE part of his journey down that mountain.

So, if the kids are clamoring to see the twenty-third reincarnation of “Terminator” this week at the Arcadia, maybe you should let them go. Then you can use that as a segue to read and talk about some great books together. Challenge yourself and your family to have adventures together this summer, both on the page and in the outdoors.


Hobo likes hiking, but spelunking scares him. He’ll be helping kids survive summer reading by making some appearances at the bookstore. Watch for his schedule at his blog: http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com. Surf on by to see him.