This book is from the genre of realistic fiction. I would rate it at about 3 of 5 stars.

This book is about a thirteen-year-old boy named Brian. His parents are divorced and he is the only one who knows his mothers secret. He is on a small plane heading to the Canadian oil fields to visit his father for the summer when suddenly the pilot has a fatal heart attack, leaving him alone in the middle of the Canadian backwoods in an airborne plane that is possibly hundreds of miles off course.
He then makes a crash landing in the woods and has to survive with only the hatchet his mother gave him as a parting gift. He has to make a shelter, eat animals he catches and survive many things. There are many exciting parts of the story, such as when Brian is attacked by a moose and almost killed and when a tornado hits his small unstable shelter. These are just a few of the exciting scenes in this novel.
There are also lots of tediously boring parts that make you want to throw the book into a fireplace. These moments are only partially made up for by the sparse exciting parts.
This book is not too original because there are lots of other books that have the same sort of plot. Although there are many parts that are probably like nothing in other books. Gary Paulsen sort of includes his own twists on to this kind of book so you can't expect every thing your going to read on the next page.
Gary Paulsen has a very odd style of writing. He had a lot of sentences that were just one word that I'm guessing were supposed to make that one word sound significant. They just sounded like some little kid had helped him write the story. Other than that his writing was okay.
As you can obviously tell I only partially enjoyed reading the book. It had its moments but mostly it was very odd and sometimes boring. He had lots of scenes that were supposed to be very dramatic and sad but he repetitively failed grandiosely. Overall, this book was okay but not great.