How to Train Your Dad, Gary Paulsen
How to Train Your Dad, Gary Paulsen
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How to Train Your Dad

Author: Gary Paulsen

Narrator: Dan Bittner

Unabridged: 3 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/05/2021


Synopsis

From the legendary author of Hatchet, a laugh-out-loud misadventure 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 father's single-minded pursuit of an off-the-grid existence. His dad may be brilliant, but dumpster-diving for food, scouring through trash for salvageable junk, and wearing clothes fully sourced from garage sales is getting old. Increasingly worried about what schoolmates and a certain girl at his new school might think of his circumstances—and encouraged by his off-kilter best friend—Carl adopts the principles set forth in a randomly discovered puppy-training pamphlet to “retrain” his dad’s mindset . . . a crackpot experiment that produces some very unintentional results.

This is a fierce and funny novel about family, green-living, and untangling some of the ties that bind from middle-grade master Gary Paulsen.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About Gary Paulsen

Gary Paulsen (1939–2021) wrote more than two hundred books for children and adults, including the father-son comedy How to Train Your Dad, and the survival adventure Northwind. Three of his novels—Hatchet, Dogsong, and The Winter Room—were Newbery Honor books. In 1997, he received the ALA’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for his contribution to young adult literature. His books have sold over 35 million copies around the world.

About Dan Bittner

Dan Bittner has narrated dozens of audio books and has starred on stage and on the screen, in movies such as Men in Black, Adventureland, and the Producers: The Movie Musical. He has also appeared onstage as Macbeth Malcolm and Sherlock Holmes in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He has narrated popular audio books such as The Eleventh Plague, Hero, and Forever.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Josiah on January 09, 2025

You can almost always tell by the title when you have a Gary Paulsen comedy on your hands, and How to Train Your Dad is no exception. Twelve-year-old Carl Hemesvedt has an unusual lifestyle: he and his father live in a trailer on a few acres by the river, leading their day-to-day in something resemb......more

Goodreads review by Melanie on June 21, 2021

Do not go into this Paulsen book looking for another exciting survival series like Brian’s Saga/Hatchet, nor will you find a gut-wrenching, based on truth historical fiction like A Soldier’s Heart. What you will get when you read “How to Train Your Dad” is a the kind of laughter that will lighten yo......more

Goodreads review by Barb on July 05, 2022

This hysterical look at father and son has great voice, writing, and memories.......more

Goodreads review by Nick on August 19, 2024

This was pretty bad. I generally like Paulsen's stuff, but this one fell drastically short. Besides being laughably environmentally unaware, the entire setup makes very little sense. Why would the father send the boy to school at all? This is clearly a homeschooling situation, and the boy would love......more

Goodreads review by Mary Beth on July 14, 2021

Thanks to Netflix for the opportunity to preview this new Paulsen intermediate novel. His works cover so many genres, but this one is most similar to Harris and Me, stories of a summer on a cousin's farm. Carl's father is totally committed to living off the grid, but that may mean Carl ends up in pi......more