Rating: 2/5
**REVIEW*CONTAINS*MINOR*SPOILERS**
This book is set a year after Brian’s experience alone in the Canadian wilderness, which is told in the novel “Hatchet”. At the beginning of this book, Brian opens the door on a man called Derek Something-I-can’t-remember, who says that he wants Brian to repeat the experience he had in the wilderness—with Derek with him—in order to teach people survival skills. I was astonished to find that Brian’s parents agreed to let Brian go!
So Brian found himself back in a bush plane, this time with Derek, and a load of supplies in the back of the plane—”Everything but the kitchen sink,” as Derek says. Brian persuades Derek to leave all of the supplies behind; Brian says that if they kept the supplies (tents, loads of food and water, fire-making tools, absolutely everything they could want), it would completely defeat the point of the experiment. They must start, argues Brian, with absolutely nothing but the clothes they wear and a radio to contact his mother in case of emergency.
And so it begins. At first, everything is going fine; the bush plane landed them in a lake very near the one that Brian crashed into in the preceding book, and they were quick to find flint with which to make fire and some sticks with which to make a somewhat crude lean-to shelter. But then everything very quickly goes wrong. There’s a storm in the middle of the night with insane amounts of deadly lightning: lightning that is quick to strike Derek, who enters a coma.
Brian calculates that a plane will come to get them in about ten days, after they’ve found that Brian and Derek haven’t done their weekly radio call that assures Brian’s mother they’re okay. Brian then realises that Derek is in a coma, not dead like he had presumed, and that, consequently, his bodily functions are still working. That means that although Derek can’t feel pain, hear or see Brian, he still needs food and water and he will… well, produce bodily waste.
Brian then realises that Derek MIGHT survive without food for ten days, but definitely not without water. So Brian embarks on a terrifyingly dangerous journey down the Necktie River, hoping to find safety at the bottom.
I thought this book had a good plot, but maybe not as a sequel to “Hatchet”—after all, after what happened to Brian in “Hatchet”, I was completely gobsmacked to find that Brian actually went back to survive in the Canadian wilderness, known for wolves, moose, bears… I also thought that it was quite well-written but not especially so, and found that a lot of Brian’s survival just depended on luck and wasn’t really that realistic.