This book is an alternative ending to Hatchet. In this book Brian is not rescued in the fall but faces a Northern winter.
Winter in the North leaves food harder to get, water mostly frozen and intense cold. It is a dry cold that chills instantly. It has an intensity that must be experienced to have any real understanding of its power and danger.
Paulsen does a good job of describing the winter. All Brian's trials, discoveries and successes are plausible.
The book is well done. It brings out many details of a northern winter most people would never think about. It suffers only because I am not fond of winter.
The book is easy to read, engaging and should captivate boys and those who have wondered if they could survive in the wilderness on their own.

I am doing a review on brians winter it is about how Brian was in a plane crash and he had to survive on his own there was a shack that he found so he fixed that up from stuff in the woods and had to make a bow to hunt his own food and it was winter so he had to make his own clothes and snow shoes so he can get around in the snow then one day he heard gun shots and found this place where people lived and he got to rescue.

"In Gary Paulsen's classic novel HATCHET, thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson is stranded in the Canadian wilderness. To survive, he must rely on his intelligence, his instincts, and one tool: a hatchet. Finally, as millions of readers know, he is rescued at the end of the summer.

But what if Brian HADN'T been rescued? What if Brian had been left to confront his deadliest enemy - winter?

Gary Paulsen raises the stakes for survival in this riveting and inspiring story as one boy faces the ultimate test and the ultimate adventure."

Although Brian's survival in The Hatchet and The River illustrated the rough life of the wild, Brian's Winter brought a different image into the mind of the readers. Hatchet, the first of the saga constantly related to the plane crash and his family and home, and in River, Brian successfully conquers the wild and gets rescued by the end of the summer. But what if he didn't? Brian, in this book, meets up with his most deadly enemy: Winter. What contrasts this book and other survival books such as My Side of the Mountain, River, and Hatchet is the constantly built up stress over winter and the slothful feel juxtaposes and makes Brian's Winter possess a different mood/tone all throughout the book.

I readily enjoyed this addition to the Hatchet series. It took me back to when I was a kid and first came across Brian and his survival story. It has the same sense of adventure and long-on-detail format as the first book. What's interesting is that Paulsen wrote this for fans who kept requesting it - what if Brian had to survive in the wilderness over the winter. What a tribute to his fans.

A quote from Brian of the book,”Brian's Winter,”It was incredible, he thought, how the snowshoes seems to change everything, change his whole attitude.” Brian, A 17 year old boy, has been trapped in the wilderness for a while. He crashed in , causing him stranded in the North Woods. He went though a lot of tough scenarios, but somehow made it through. He had to survive the plane crash, find his own food, make his own shelter and weapons, and stay warm throughout the year. Then, winter came. Brian had not known anything about the Northern Winters. The winter was the toughest part of his survival. But Brian made it through.
Alright, to point out a few things I did like about Brian’s winter, it presented many realistic things about it. Like having to survive the cold, hunger, making a shelter. I also liked it because it shows a lot of thriller, and action. If you really were looking for a book that you could finish in a day, Brian’s Winter is the book for you.

BOOOOO one star for a misleading tagline “what if Brian had never been rescued?” He literally got rescued at the end of the book??? I was ready for him to die out there

I used this as a read aloud with my seven year old boys. They loved hatchet and have liked this one. Sometimes Gary's writing is a little disjointed, it kept tripping me up as I was reading aloud, but over all this was an interesting adventure.

Brian’s Winter, a fiction chapter book, was written by Gary Paulsen, first published by Scholastic in 1996. What if Brian was not rescued (at the end of Hatchet)? What if he had to endure his situation as the season changed from Fall to Winter? Brian had been lucky to find the survival pack that allowed for food and emergency supplies, but how long would they last? In the Canadian wilderness, there would be new threats for Brian to overcome as food becomes more scarce and the threat of freezing temperatures creep into his growing list of issues.
Grades: 6-12
Guided Reading Level: S
Lexile: 1140
134 pages
Teaching Ideas: Brian's Winter Classroom Activity: Students will refer to their list of necessities that they had created for the activity in Hatchet. They will return to their original list and examine it to see if any items will be helpful for winter for Brian. After review of previous activity, have students write a summary of their supplies and how they could be modified for winter and expand on what would be needed to survive a winter in the Canadian wilderness.
3-5-ETS1-1. Define a simple design problem reflecting a need or a want that includes specified criteria for success and constraints on materials, time, or cost.
3-5-ETS1-2. Generate and compare multiple possible solutions to a problem based on how well each is likely to meet the criteria and constraints of the problem.
CCRA.R.7. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
CCRA.SL.2 Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about grade 2 topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups.

I like this a lot since it shows the plot of what could have happened if the end of book 1 didn't happen. With Brian's luck from the first book and not when he found the survivial pack, this book would have been 75 pages, thats it, the thing I like about this book is that Brian is not liking his situation but there are some parts that makes me feel that he is feeling kinda ok in his temporary home, like with the skunk, he just had to feed it and it would be nice to him, he formed a bond with it and that is something that a many people do if they were like this, he's become the old man of the mountains. I would have given this 4 stars for 1 reason but then thought it didn't matter that much. The fact that there was help literally so close to his camp (the man and the dog and whoever else was there, like he could just have been nice and gone to help him sooner, right, but it wouldn't really make a fun book series for the readers, it take them 1 hour or 40 minutes to read through the whole thing if it was too soon. So I give this book full 5 stars because of that, it wasn't the worst reason, but I still loved it, I should read the 2nd and if there is a 4th book, that one 2, Brian I'm pretty sure wants a mcdouble right now.

This book is part of a series in the Brian books, like Hatchet. It is about a kid named Brian Robeson that learns how to survive in the wilderness with only a hatchet. The more he learns the more he gets smarter. He learns how to create weapons and his hunting skills improve as days go by. This book is a kind of book that once you start reading you cannot put it down or just leave it, because the further you go into the book the more you want to read it. It is intense. I have learned that in survival it is important to keep yourself busy doing something, keeping yourself hydrated, and not letting yourself go. What I like about this book is that it gives me an adrenaline feeling. For me there are really no dislikes about this book. On a scale of 1-10 I would give this a 10. I would recommend this book for many people that are into survival tactics and intense story lines.

This is more like it. I'd continued on with Brian's story, after The River, because it was said that Brian's Winter is Hatchet continued on -- the radio thing didn't work.

Superb. I think that one would need to read Hatchet to understand the simplicities of Brian's life in the woods, and how he got out of his head and into quiet and stillness.

Quite a Good Read.