How to Train Your Dad
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
From Gary Paulsen, the award-winning author of Hatchet, comes a laugh-out-loud eco-adventure about a boy, his free-thinking dad and the puppy-training pamphlet that turns their summer upside down.
Twelve-year-old Carl is fed up with his dad; he may be brilliant, but bin-diving for food, scouring through rubbish for 'salvageable' junk and wearing clothes fully sourced from garage sales is getting old. Increasingly worried by what his schoolmates will think – and encouraged by his riotous best friend – Carl decides to use a puppy-training pamphlet to 'retrain' his dad’s mindset . . . a crackpot experiment that produces some hilarious results!
How To Train Your Dad is a fierce and funny novel about family, friendship and green-living from middle-grade master Gary Paulsen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a comically wry narration, Carl Hemesvedt explains that he desperately wants to be "lookatable" to impress classmate Peggy. But this poses a challenge for the cued-white 12-going-on-13-year-old, whose resourceful but mishap-prone single father believes in living off the grid in a "semi-scroungy" trailer in an industrial area, dumpster-diving for food, and bartering labor for clothes at garage sales. When Carl discovers a puppy-training pamphlet in a marked-down bag of food for the family's pit bull rescue, he tries applying its tenet of positive reinforcement to persuade his father to adopt more socially acceptable habits, also enlisting the help of garrulous best friend Pooder. Newbery Honoree Paulsen, renowned for his tales of survival, revisits the humor and hijinks found in his Liar, Liar series. Carl's hang-dog descriptions of having to wear pink overalls and ride an "original creation" bike are funny and endearing, and eternal optimist Pooder is the perfect sidekick to perpetually resigned Carl. And underneath the training mishaps is a sweet story about a kid who figures out that his life—and his dad—may not be so bad after all. Ages 10–14.
