Dancing Carl

Gr 5–7—This short story (Atheneum, 1983) by Gary Paulsen takes place during an earlier time in McKinley, Minnesota, where life revolves around playing hockey. When Carl returns to the small town as a war veteran, no one knows quite what to make of him. Marsh and his best friend, Willy, hang out at the rinks observing Carl's strange behavior and trying to figure him out. Marsh narrates his observations of Carl as he tiptoes along the edge of sanity, hitting the bottle while listening and dancing to scratchy records. Will a strange courtship save him or send him over the edge? What may be a poetic story to read turns into something more tedious in audio format. Nick Podehl voices the characters with more conviction than the story demands, and the writing is somewhat wearisome. So many words are spent explaining that something great is going to happen that the actual event is anticlimactic.—Jill Webb, Farmington Community Library,