I Am Still Alive (Kate Alice Marshall)

I Am Still Alive
Kate Alice Marshall
Penguin Books
Fiction, YA Mystery/Suspense
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: After the car accident that killed her mother, sixteen-year-old Jess Cooper struggled to recover, physically and mentally. Now she's being sent to the Alaskan wilderness to live with a father she barely remembers. She can hardly manage a paved sidewalk without her damaged leg giving out on her: how is she supposed to manage living in the deep woods, let alone get along with a man who hasn't bothered to send so much as a postcard for a decade? Despite his insistence that she'll grow to love the life as much as he does, she's determined to leave as soon as possible.
Then the men in the red plane come - and everything falls apart in gunfire and flames.
With her father dead, their cabin burned to the ground, and nobody even aware of where she is, Jess finds herself facing near-certain death. But she's grown used to pain and desperation... and she's not about to die when there's even a sliver of a chance to exact revenge.

REVIEW: This book is a conscious tribute to Gary Paulsen's classic survival tale Hatchet, with an older female protagonist and a vengeance angle. Jess starts out with both emotional and physical baggage; not only is she still scarred and damaged from the car crash, but she carries vast reserves of anger and abandonment issues. Her father is not a perfect man, and the fate that befalls him is at least partly due to his own poor judgement and decisions. Still, Jess is able to pull herself together, relying (like Brian in Hatchet) on scraps of memories, the world around her, and a growing gut-level intuition to claw survival from an unforgiving wilderness. Her education isn't without some mistakes, compounded by persistent complications from her bad leg and back; she is not miraculously cured by getting back to nature, nor do her mental scars vanish overnight. She also learns more about the father she hardly knew, and - by extension - aspects of her late beloved mother. Her parents loved her, but they were people in the end, ultimately as fallible as Jess herself. Numerous crises and setbacks arise, all with the ever-present threat of the return of the men who murdered her dad (and the question of what she'll do when given the chance at revenge), making for a fast-reading and intense tale. A few stumbles at the climax held the story back from a solid fourth star in the ratings. I can't get into specifics without spoilers, but one element in particular came close to dropping the story another half-star. Those issues aside, I Am Still Alive lives up to its promise of suspense and wilderness survival and a heroine who, though knocked down numerous times, somehow keeps finding the grit to climb back up.

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