Harris and Me: A Summer Remembered by Gary Paulsen, Wendell Minor (Illustrator), Wendell Minor (Illustrator)

From Barnes & Noble

At first, Harris was not a friend of choice. In fact, Harris wasn't a friend at all: the first-person narrator was dumped on this distant cousin's family as part of "a kind of rotation...of many uncles and shirttail relatives." To a city boy, this unruly farmer's son doesn't seem exactly respectable. For starters, he goes mouse hunting, enthusiastically wrestles 300-pound pigs, fights chickens, and rides a motorized bike. Clearly, Harris is no moral guide, but his mischievous ways do provide a hardscrabble education for a troubled young boy finding his way.

From the Publisher

A young city boy is sent to spend the summer on his aunt and uncle's farm. Though he has lived many places over the years, he has never experienced anything like farm life . . . and he has never met anyone like Harris, his daredevil of a cousin. If the two of them can survive wrestling three-hundred-pound pigs and mouse-hunting with toothless old Louie's fire-spitting pet lynx—which, unlike his master, has plenty of teeth—they just might make it through the summer!

The ALAN Review

Harris is one of a kind. His city cousin spends the summer with Harris, and finds farm life holds many surprises when your mentor is eleven years old and primed to try anything from fighting chickens and tackling pigs, to imitating Tarzan. Paulsen has an excellent eye for the slightly off-beat details, from the hired hand who never seems to take a bath and the rooster who lies in ambush for human prey, to Buzzer the killer cat. The life of Harris and his family on the hardscrabble farm could be unmercifully grim if it were not for Harris' exuberance for living life fully. The book contains some swearing, but Paulsen makes this one of Harris' traits that constantly gets him in trouble. This book is guaranteed not to stay on the shelf for long, once junior high boys discover it.

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