Axe today, they were once an integral part of a joiner and carpenter's tool kit, not just a tool for use in forestry. A tool of similar origin is the billhook. Most modern axes have steel heads and wooden handles, typically hickory in the US and ash in Europe and Asia, although plastic or fibreglass handles are also common. Modern axes are specialised by use, size and form. Hafted axes with short handles designed for use with one hand are often called hand axes but the term hand axe refers to axes without handles as well. Hatchets tend to be small
Handles (novel) comic tale ... Jan Mark knows how young people think and talk." From the "New York Times" review: "Jan Mark stretches the range of children's books ... she provides for young people the combination of fine prose and strong realism generally reserved for adults." In Tucker's obituary view more than twenty years later, "Handles" was a "happy, optimistic work" in which the heroine found in the motorbike-repair shop "the company and interests she had always longed for". This was in marked contrast to three of Mark's earlier works, young adult science-fiction novels set in "a hopeless future", which some critics