Dogsong

Yet another Newbery winner, yet another disappointment. I had moderate expectations for this book; it's by Gary Paulsen (the dude who wrote Hatchet) and it's about Eskimos (an interesting people underrepresented in literature). But no. This book started out mediocre and literally never got better. To put it mathematically, the derivative of "how good the book is" with respect to page number never exceeded zero. But what should I have expected? A white American dude tries to write from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old Inuit kid, and it's supposed to work? I got the feeling that Paulsen kind of quit a third of the way through this one when the Inuit kid just starts being haunted by dreams or visions or some other pseudo-Amerindian bullshit. And in the end, he writes a song about it, because apparently the Inuit are all about songs even though a quick Wikipedia search on Inuit culture comes up showing no important significance given to songs. Did Gary Paulsen really just make shit up for 150 pages after a dragged out mediocre introduction? Seems like it. Just stick with Hatchet.