This is autobiographical by Gary Paulsen. WE have a lot of his books in our library. The cover of this book seemed intriguing. Yet, the content was not. First, it is written in 3rd person, a weird point of view for an autobiography. Second, this doesn't read like a narrative book. Instead, it is in sections or parts. There are no bridges or lead ins into the next part. The timeline simply jumps. At the beginning he is a six year old boy living on his Aunt and Uncle's farm, then he is on a boat. Then, he is about 10 or 12 in The Philippines, then he is suddenly 16-18 years old in Minnesota living as a homeless kid. Maybe a high school library would use this book, but, it would be even hard for YA readers to follow and I honestly think a teen would read some of it, but bring it back unfinished..

While I did not finish this book because I lost interest, I think kids will enjoy it as they do other Gary Pauline books. I would definitely add to a library collection.

After hearing an interview with Gary Paulsen, I knew I needed to read this book! I read Hatchet once, a long time ago, but I was more interested in reading about the author. What an incredible life he has led... incredible in the sense of almost unbelievable. Heartbreaking through most of it, but filled with slivers of hope. Fans of his work will love reading about how it came to be. Those who prefer memoirs or biographies will love this as well.

Gone to the Woods read more like a collection of short stories than a memoir. I loved the early section where Mr. Paulsen is living with his aunt and uncle. I kept waiting for him to return there, but the story never looped back. I was looking for memoirs to recommend for middle schoolers, but will pass on this one.

Absolutely loved this look back at Gary Paulsen's boyhood. What a sad and tragic story, but also very hopeful. I love the message that by meeting a librarian he changed the entire course of his life. Wonderful story! I will definitely recommend for purchase and to patrons who come in wanting a good story!

This was a sad yet inspirational memoir. I'm so impressed that Gary Paulsen was able to overcome his childhood and that looking back on it 70-80 years later he remember so many details. I wish he hadn't had that sort of life though and I hope this book reaches the child of today who needs to know life can be better than you expect.

The renowned author Gary Paulsen recently published another survival story. This survival story isn’t fictional like his Newbery Award winning novel Hatchet or his other survival novels, nor is it one of his nonfiction survival books about the Iditarod or a fascinating wilderness trek . “Gone To the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood” is his personal survival story. The story of how he overcame a rough childhood and young adulthood, and eventually emerged a famous author whose works will live on for decades.

As a school librarian, I have read pretty much everything he has ever written, used his books to turn many a reluctant reader into an avid one, and been blessed to hear him speak at the Texas Library Association Conference over the 38 year span I was a practicing school and public librarian. He was as mesmerizing a speaker as he was an author. I often thought his books should have been more actively marketed to adults and not just readers in the 4th through 12th grades. His books had varying degrees of “maturity” in them, and there were some I would put in a 4th graders hands, but many I thought only appropriate for 7th grade or 8th grade up despite the publisher marketing them at a younger audience. Some children who deal with difficult things in life need to read books with more mature subject matter to know they are not alone, whereas others with more sheltered lives do not need to read mature topics at a very young age as they do not have the capacity to process them yet and make sense of them. This title—marketed towards age 8 up—is one. I feel it should be marketed 7th grade up at least. Unless there was a child living the reality of a difficult life where they have had to grow up entirely too soon.

It is, a stellar read, however. Paulsen understands the genres of survival and adventure fiction and nonfiction because he has personally lived them in his own life. I had heard many times his story about how a librarian and a library literally saved his life because he grew up in an abusive household with alcoholic and neglectful parents, but had never hear all of the material in this book. It is gripping. Paulsen is a master at his craft.

Here is how the memoir begins:

“1944:

He was not literally an orphan, but he was a lost child. He was born in 1939 and his father was in the army—a low-level officer on General George S. Patton’s staff who was gone for the whole of the Second World War—and they would not meet each other until he was seven years old. When he was four, his mother took him—dragged might be a better word—to Chicago where she went to work in a munitions plant making twenty-millimeter cannon shells. She had grown up on a small northern Minnesota farm, wearing handsewn dresses made out of flour sacks and earning, if she was lucky, twenty-five cents a week. She now had a seemingly endless supply of pocket money from her steady hourly wage but was not even remotely prepared to resist the temptations of life in the big city. Caught up in a life of heavy drinking and wild partying, she no longer had the time or attention to raise the boy right.”

Eventually the boy’s grandmother and relatives back in Minnesota hear about his unsuitable life, and he is sent all by himself on a train to ride on a train full of badly injured solders as well as civilians from Illinois to Minnesota. In Minnesota he enjoys one of the sole happy times of his childhood when he lives on a Minnesota farm with a childless aunt and uncle.

Here are a couple of passages from that portion of them book:

“They sat for a time in silence. Then out of nowhere his stomach rumbled and Edy heard it.

“Are you hungry?”

“I could eat,” he said.

“How about a thick slice of fresh bread with honey and a glass of milk?”

But what he ate wasn’t regular bread with honey and milk. It was warm fresh bread cut in a slice as thick … as thick as the side of his hands one on top of another, coated with grit-salty butter and a complete covering layer of honey just gone to sugar crystals from a jar on the shelf next to the stove, and a glass of milk so thick with cream it could almost be chewed. And into the milk, to make it exactly perfectly right, Edy stirred in a big spoonful of the same honey.

He took one huge bite and thought about God. He had never thought much about Him although he had heard swearing in the bars where he sang where they used His name. But the first bite into the honey and butter and warm bread made the boy think of Him and, when he chewed and it tasted so wonderful that it made his jaws ache, he thought that He must have something to do with it: the bread, the honey, the butter, how it tasted, how it all worked.

It had to be God.

He was going to say something about it to Edy but couldn’t think of how to make the right words, how they would be, so he turned and smiled and with his mouth full said: “Thank you.”

And here is another passage from when he goes on a canoe trip with his uncle to pick mushrooms for the winter:

“The boy raised up, looking over the front of the canoe, and found he was in a different world. It was so beautiful that even later it was hard to describe, like an impossibly beautiful painting that by some magic had been made alive, real. As with the road and driveway, the trees had leaned and grown so much they touched each other over the top of the stream and made a green tunnel. And even that, just the way it looked, was filled with beauty. But more, because of the water, the trees had not only touched at the top but had kept growing, so that they were intertwined, making a lovely thatch cover, a long, wonderful room with a living roof.

And inside the space, inside the beauty, the stream slowly, gently slid along. On both sides of the canoe, lily pads leaned and danced with the current, as hordes of dragonflies moved from pad to pad catching flies and, sometimes, each other.”

Sadly, the boy’s mother comes to pick him up, and he is taken by her to San Francisco and then a Manila that is still suffering the ravages of war. He sees things no child should see both on the trip out, and, in Manila which has guerrilla warfare going on from Philippinos who do not want the Americans occupying their country—the Japanese were bad enough.

By age thirteen he is back in Minnesota living with two drunken neglectful parents and surviving basically on his own. At this age he has already run away several times to escape and survived working on farms and sleeping in barns etc., but this time he decides to stay. Why? Because of the library and the librarian who doesn’t see a neglected dirty street child, but instead sees a human being who is worthy of being treated with kindness. At first, he runs into the Carnegie library to escape bullies or get warm, but eventually the librarian gives him a library card, and books to read, and a notebook to write in and pencil. And these actions change his life.

Here is a passage from the section of the book captioned “The Library”:

“Big old bugger of a building. Solid brick with carved stone over the entry doors that read: CARNEGIE. Old, with high windows that let in shafted sunlight so everything looked like it was made of gold. Square windowpanes that seemed to channel the shafts of gold light filled with dust motes. And all around were stacks and stacks of books against the walls, with freestanding shelves in the middle of the rooms filled with more books. On the left as he came in was a high flat rack with magazines and newspapers against the wall and, in front of that, large oak tables with straight-back oak chairs. Light shined down on the dark oak of the tables so they seemed alive. Deep oak color in the light-like-living wood.

And quiet. No hard sounds. Just smooth quiet.

Place smelled like wood and what? Smelled like … books. Official-looking wood-book-smelling quiet place that made you relax the minute you came in the door.

That’s what made it feel safe. An official government place where nobody would mess with you. A safe place where none of the loud-hard kids would come.

A kind place.

That was it. An official kind place. Big building with gold light on oak tables where you could be safe.

But North Dakota was safe as well. As safe as the library. Even more because, once he ran west, he was far from all the bad things that tracked him now. Away from the hard ones, away from his parent-vipers, where he could move in daylight and not have to run in alleys.

Still he stayed.

Even though he knew it was safer working farms in North Dakota—especially now that he could drive the big grain dump trucks and the big diesel tractor for plowing that made his shoulders bigger.

And yet he stayed.

And he knew, even as he worked his brain around it, that the real reason he had not run away this time wasn’t just the library.

It was the library and the librarian.”

I highly recommend this book—just not for age 8 up as the publisher does. Middle school up with a grown up to talk to about it would be what I would recommend. And adults will find it fascinating also.

Thank you Gary Paulsen for authoring yet another powerful book. And thank you Macmillan and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book and for allowing me the privilege of reviewing it. (Publication date: 12 January 2021)

Honest adventure of real life. The connection that the reader is able to make with the author is one that is heartfelt, sad, concerned and brutally honest. Imagine the survival skills that saved our author, the thinking on your feet reflexes and adaptation to his life as it dealt a new hand every day. To call his parents 'vipers' gave the reader the true feeling, not a cleaned up for the audience feeling, of his discontent and hatred for them-which he had every right to feel as they were not parents, they were merely existing for themselves. Although, I am truly and ever grateful they brought, through God's grace, son Gary into the world. How much we would miss his sharing of stories, this one "Gone to the Woods" is out there for anyone who thinks they don't come from much, but understand the value of unlocking whatever is within them, for the greater good.

I know it's sacrilege but I have never really been a Gary Paulsen fan. I am a good librarian - I suggest the books to tons to students and have done book groups with Hatchet, discussed the movie, etc. But my personal taste...

So... probably not a surprise that I didn't like this. The section about him living with his aunt and uncle and what he learned from them was great but then it meandered on and I wanted more - what ever happened to them? Then the section about the librarian was great - but I wanted more. Did he ever reconnect with her? And the last half of the book just flew through time and skipped so much in between that I just didn't feel the message or connection of how his early experiences in the woods helped him survive.

Sometimes a survival story isn't about being lost alone in the woods, sometimes a survival story is being lost in the life you're given. Paulsen's Gone to the Woods recounts stories from his youth and his survival into adulthood.

Paulsen gives us glimpses of growing up largely alone, the son of two dysfunctional parents whose greatest service to him was giving him up to other family members to look after for a time. The author has lived an extraordinary life. From literally singing for his dinner in the bars of Chicago to wandering the streets of Manila, there is nothing he could tell me that I wouldn't believe. It seems he has seen and done it all.

The teacher in me especially loved how he described falling in love with books and reading. An incredibly fascinating read and great for discussions of overcoming adversity.

Gone To The Woods was a heartbreaking and hopeful book. I had expected it to be a middle-grade title, and the first half of the book was filled with Paulsen's days spent on the farm with his aunt and uncle. The beautiful descriptions of these days allows the reader to understand where Paulsen's love of the outdoors came from. Then the book takes a dramatic turn when his neglectful mother comes to take him away to the Philippines. The reader now sees the life of abuse and neglect that was introduced, though not fully explained, at the very beginning of the book. The trauma that Paulsen went through at home, in addition to several horrific events that he had the misfortune to witness, would lead me to reserve this book for upper middle grade, perhaps even YA. It is truly a gripping tale, one that had me reading nonstop, a story of amazing resilience in the face of trauma.

I enjoyed this coming of age book, especially the scenes on his long train tide. My emotions for him and his experiences were all over the place and went from amusement, to wonder, horror and admiration.

A fascinating young person's narrative memoire of author, Gary Paulsen. It is a story of adventure, travel, growing up in uncertainty and writing one's way into a new life. The events that led to the popularity of Gary Paulsen adventure stories is always playing in your mind when you read his harrowing feats of surviving childhood. Brilliant!

This book was a great reminder of why I fell in love with Paulsen’s writing some thirty years ago. He has a way of telling a story that gets right to this mountain girl’s heart. I have read other bits and pieces of his life story, but this one painted a picture of a boy who had to grow up too soon and learn to handle all that life threw at him. I think it ended way too soon, but don’t all of his stories? I am looking forward to sharing this book with middle grade readers and a few adult friends as well.

Reading Gone to The Woods felt like sitting in a quiet booth in the back of a mahogany bar while Paulsen told me his story over bitter, smokey whiskey. The author's voice was steady and measured while courageously speaking about unspeakable experiences.
His story felt foreign and unimaginable but I could see it, could feel empathy and understanding for him. There is a universality to the story even though the situations the Boy found himself in felt uniquely abysmal.
I highly recommend this book; especially to the hardy ones who have their own survival stories- woods or no woods.

An astounding story of the childhood of this well-known author of survivor stories. By the time you finish this unsparing memoir, you will know that he came by his knowledge honestly. By turns riveting, heartbreaking, and uplifting.

This book broke my heart, over and over, and then put it back together again.

Gary Paulsen has always been a literary hero of mine. As a veteran English teacher, I can’t possibly count the number of times I’ve read “Hatchet” with my middle school classes. It’s the kind of book that holds a particular magic, in that it can touch the heart of anyone who reads it. People from all walks of life just connect with Gary Paulsen’s writing style, and “Gone to the Woods” is no different.

From the first pages, the reader is just drawn right into the story and can’t turn the pages fast enough. The boy in this story remains nameless, but we all know it’s Gary himself. As I read I continually thought, “How can this be real life? How can all these terrible and amazing things happen to just one person?” But it’s not just some random person, it’s Gary Paulsen - a literary legend who lived through more than most of us can ever imagine.

There is so much pain within these pages, but so much healing, too. As an octogenarian, Paulsen has retold these years of his life in a way that lets us all know, even without him coming right out and saying it, that he is okay. And, if he can be okay with all the terrible hands that life dealt him, maybe the rest of us can somehow, someday be okay, too.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-arc to review.

This was phenomenal. I read it in one day, and my heart broke and soared with "the boy" as he told his story. What an incredible life. I'm so glad that he was gifted a notebook and pencil.

I loved Gary Paulsen's book Gone to the Woods.. This autobiographical look at young Paulsen's life is by equal turns beautiful and heartbreaking. His connection with nature, we come to understand intimately through his relationship with Aunt Edy and Uncle Sig is gorgeously written and ties in with so many of his other books. In my school, I will be listing the book as YA due to graphic descriptions of violence and alcohol use. Highly recommended.

Wonderful - this will be perfect for the children in my schools who devour his books. The adults in my schools, who also grew up reading Paulsen, will be equally delighted.