Is Hatchet Clean? Profanity and Content Guide for the Audiobook

Hatchet is about as clean as survival stories get. Gary Paulsen's classic about a thirteen-year-old boy stranded alone in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash has eight tagged moments in total. One is a mild profanity and one a mild blasphemy, each lasting about a second. The other six are violence, all rated moderate, and together they account for almost two minutes, which is nearly everything filtered from a book that runs a little under four hours. Given the premise, that makes sense: there is a crash, injury, and the hard physical realities of staying alive with nothing but a hatchet. None of it was rated severe. The total skipped time is two minutes, under one percent of the book, and Peter Coyote's narration is otherwise untouched. My honest recommendation is that most families can play this one with no filters at all. It is a book many kids read in school, and the intensity is the point of the story. If you have a younger or more sensitive listener, turn on Violence and you've covered nearly every tag in the book; the two language moments are so brief and mild they aren't worth worrying about. I'd hand this to a nine or ten year old without hesitation, and it makes a great shared listen in the car because you won't be reaching for the volume.