“Woods Runner” by Gary Paulsen

This is one of the Sunshine State Young Reader’s books for the middle schools this year.

Samuel is thirteen years old in 1776, living in the wilderness of Pennsylvania with his parents. Knowledge of the war has just started to trickle into their homestead, when it’s attacked. Samuel tracks his parents, meeting both helpful and hurtful people along the way. Will Samuel be able to rescue his parents before the British kill them?

I don’t really like wilderness/survival stories, so I never would have picked this one up to read on my own. Setting that aside, I didn’t like the explanations before each chapter – it really chopped the novel up, and I felt like the story never had a good rhythm. I think the information would have been better before just a few of the chapters, to help the story move along. That being said, there was nothing really wrong with this book, and if you like survival stories, or stories about young folks during war time (without too much graphic violence), you’ll like this one. Including my personal feeling about this genre, I give it a 6.5.

Read-A-Likes: Sarah Bishop by Scott O'Dell, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier, The Fighting Ground by Avi