Will I love Winterdance?

I’m always comforted to read all the different mistakes Gary Paulsen made while learning to drive a dogsled; it makes me feel better about my own (sometimes quite inefficient) attempts to acquire new skills.

It doesn’t hurt that his mistakes are so damn funny—especially from the safety of the reader’s side of the book! I wouldn’t want to experience The Night of Numerous Skunks, or hallucinate from continuous cold and physical exertion, but it does make a great story.

I never dreamed about running the Iditarod—and this book didn’t change that!—but I found it fascinating to read about someone… show more.

I love a story that tells it straight, right from when the person was a know-nothing beginner and was trying and failing, and trying and failing…and oh, the failures that Paulsen somehow survived! The drive and obsession that kept him going all the way to the big one, the Iditarod, shows me the beauty of what an individual can do, even all alone, unwitnessed and unhelped, in the middle of the freezing winter night, with a pack of dogs that doesn’t even care about him a little bit yet.

In reading this book, I feel I have witnessed how a… show more.