Blogger Book Club

You have to have guts to read this book. Seriously, Gary Paulsen makes this historic fiction as real as it gets. He puts thirteen-year-old Samuel in the middle of the woods during the Revolutionary War of 1776. Samuel actually "reads" the woods (tracks, smells, etc.). Samuel not only has to contend with the wilderness, he also has to face the reality of Iroquois, Hessians, the British, and more. He does all this while minding a little girl he rescues. With the help of strangers, he makes it to New York to find his parents.
Paulsen does not parse words. It's as if you can actually hear the muskets. Paulsen does not use paragraphs for transition. In the next sentence, everything changes. Needless to say, it is very fast-paced. A unique feature (not a distraction) is that he puts between each chapter valuable information which is not readily available in too many other sources. This is an important dose of reality about what a person had to go through during the Revolutionary War of 1776.