Mr. Tucket
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- ¥710
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- ¥710
発行者による作品情報
Fourteen-year-old Francis Tucket is heading west on the Oregon Trail with his family by wagon train. When he receives a rifle for his birthday, he is thrilled that he is being treated like an adult. But Francis lags behind to practice shooting and is captured by Pawnees. It will take wild horses, hostile tribes, and a mysterious one-armed mountain man named Mr. Grimes to help Francis become the man who will be called Mr. Tucket.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Here's a real knock 'em, sock 'em, ripsnorter guaranteed to keep any boy (and any girl who doesn't mind a dearth of female characters) enthralled from first page through last. In 1848, a 14-year-old boy is captured from an Oregon-bound wagon train by Pawnee Indians and saved by one-armed mountain man Mr. Grimes. Paulsen ( Hatchet ) throws in enough ridin', wrasslin' and shootin' (along with plenty of dead bodies, white and Indian) to satiate the most action-loving reader. But his book is more than an impeccably detailed homage to the Saturday-afternoon horse opera. Although Braid, a Pawnee warrior, is without question the bad guy here, Paulsen makes it clear that, by settling on the Indians' land, even the most peaceable white farmers--such as protagonist Francis Alphonse Tucket's family--disqualify themselves as good guys. And the author plants doubts as to whether Grimes, who trades ammunition with the Pawnee in exchange for trapping on their land, really does ``ride right down the middle'' between the white and Indian worlds, as he claims. Superb characterizations, splendidly evoked setting and thrill-a-minute plot make this book a joy to gallop through. Ages 12-up.
