tell me what happens next Thoughts of his parents' divorce fill Brian Robeson's head as he flies in a single-engine plane to visit his father in the Canadian wilderness. When the pilot suffers a massive heart attack and dies, Brian must
somehow land the plane by himself and then, left with only the clothes he is wearing and a hatchet he received from his mother as a parting gift, Brian must put thoughts of his past behind him and try to figure out how he can stay alive...
''A heart-stopping story...something beyond adventure, a book that plunges readers into the cleft of the protagonist's experience." —Publishers Weekly
A Newbery Honor Book
An ALA Notable Book
Booklist Editor's Choice
1.
BRIAN ROBESON stared out the window of the small plane at the endless green northern wilderness below. It
was a small plane, a Cessna 406—a bush-plane—and the engine was so loud, so roaring and
consuming and loud, that it ruined any chance for conversation.
Not that he had much to say. He was thirteen and the only passenger on the plane with a pilot
named—what was it? Jim or Jake or something— who was in his mid-forties and who had been silent
as he worked to prepare for take-off. In feet since Brian had come to the small airport in Hampton, New York to meet the plane—driven by his mother—the pilot had spoken only five words to him.
"Get in the copilot's seat." Which Brian had done. They had taken off and that was the last of the
conversation. There had been the initial excitement, of course. He had never flown in a single-engine
plane before and to be sitting in the copilot's seat with all the controls right there in front of him, all
the pilot took off, had been interesting and exciting. But in five minutes they had leveled off at six thousand feet and headed northwest and from then on the pilot had been silent, staring out the front,
and the drone of the engine had been all that was left. The drone and the sea of green trees that lay
before the plane's nose and flowed to the horizon, spread with lakes, swamps, and wandering
streams and rivers.
Now Brian sat, looking out the window with the roar thundering through his ears, and tried to
catalog what had led up to his taking this flight. The thinking started. Always it started with a single word. Divorce.