Paulsen's: Sisters

Paulsen begins to create a set of portraits of two teenage girls. The comparison of two girls surviving their beauty and youth is incomplete and fairly unsatisfying. Paulsen chooses a cheerleader and a child prostitute, similar only in age and beauty apparantly, to draw his comparison. The misleading title pretends to make more of a connection between the two girls than actually exists. Paulsen does not write deeply enough about either girl, or build enough tension to end his story in the abrupt manner in which it is ended. This story reads more like a story starter. A point is made but ever so slight and hardly worth the telling. Arguably, the abrupt ending is meant to be an exclamation point. The reader may be left to wonder why these stereotypes needed an exclamation point when they probably deserved more of a story.

Paulsen's: The Tent

A teen boy and his father embark on a life altering trek across the hot, flat Texas landscape one summer. They discover a way to use an old army tent for making total strangers give them large portions of their money. After becoming rich, they find out the high cost of wealth. Paulsen's predictable "parable for one sitting" uses simple characters talking in simple dialog to tell a simple tale with a profound and important lesson.

Paulsen's: Hatchet

A story of a young teen learning to survive his parent's divorce quickly turns into a story of true wilderness survival for the boy and his one tool, a gift from his mother, a Hatchet. Gary Paulsen's Newbery Honor Book bumps along clumsily, in and out of a what passes as a teen voice back and forth between first and third person. What will capture the reader are the passages of problem solving and near disaster-avoiding adventure. Run-ins with wild life, trial and error lessons in the search for basic necessities, and face-to-face interaction with the force of nature are enough to make this a satisfying quick-read. Oh yeah, and a plane crashes. Although Paulsen's main character learns completely on his own, he is not quite as engaging as Jean Craighead George's Sam Gribley.

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