I am not much of an animal person, I am definitely NOT a sports person, and I rarely get excited about nonfiction... BUT THIS BOOK WAS ABSOLUTELY RIVETING. I know I read Hatchet at some point as a younger person (I am prone to a certain type of YA survivalist adventure story), but that was the extent of my familiarity with Paulsen's work.

His voice is at once level-headed, observant, humorous, self-deprecating, and poetic. I loved learning more about working and living with these amazing dogs. The Iditarod race is so unbelievably demanding that I had to keep closing my mouth as I read - I kept realizing that my jaw had dropped open. And yet, he writes about training for and running the race in such a way that I was almost ready to head for Alaska and try it myself.

Here is one passage that attempts to describe what I assume cannot be described:

"Do you like the race so far?"
I looked at her, trying to find sarcasm, but she was serious; she really wanted to know. And I thought of how to answer her.
I had gotten lost, been run over by a moose, watched a dog get killed, saw a man cry, dragged over a third of the teams off on the wrong trail, and been absolutely hammered by beauty while all this was happening. (It was, I would find later, essentially a normal Iditarod day - perhaps a bit calmer than most.) I opened my mouth.
"I..."
Nothing came. She patted my arm and nodded. "I understand. It's so early in the race. There'll be more later to talk about..."
And she left me before I could tell her that I thought my whole life had changed, that my basic understanding of values had changed, that I wasn't sure if I would ever recover, that I had seen god and he was a dog-man and that nothing, ever, would be the same for me again, and it was only the first true checkpoint of the race.
I had come just one hundred miles. (162-63)

5 stars!

Very good and interesting. My interest is peaked to learn more about the Iditarod and see if other musher experiences are like this one. Although many times I remember thinking “how has this guy not died?” It made for an intriguing story. It may be more interesting to read the second half of the book while the race is taking place if you are not looking for the author's background, but the entire story is intriguing.

I remember strongly disliking the hero of the Hatchet series. Now I know why. Gary Paulsen is an idiot. But bless him, he's an idiot with a great memory and a flair for the self-deprecating humor, the kind that leaves you almost as incapacitated as Paulsen being dragged behind a team of Devil clones. Really? He thought buying a sled dog named Devil was a good idea? From then on, nothing shocked me, but it sure did make me laugh. I'm glad he at least kept his wits about him enough to remember what those around him said when they witnessed his lunacy. Not only is the book beautiful, he manages to capture the allure of the Iditarod, and maybe even more importantly, the allure of the insane training runs. I'm just shocked he lived to tell the tale.

I am not a dog person, and I couldn't have imagined how compelling this book could be. The descriptions of nature surrounding the dog sledding, and Paulsen's relationships with his dogs, in particular, were very beautiful. Paulsen used an intriguing technique throughout this book, where he would announce ahead of time what was going to happen - far from working like spoilers, it made the story even more suspenseful. The book is also very funny and I laughed a lot. Highly recommended!

Would have been 5 stars, but the ending was weird, sad, and abrupt.

I absolutely loved this book, which was a surprise to me. I wanted something a little different, I like reading about snow and cold in the middle of a hot and humid summer, I knew Paulsen was a best-selling children's author (although this is written for adults), and I had read some excellent reviews, so decided to give it a try.

I expected the dogs and adventure descriptions and the dangers of running the Iditerod; what I didn't expect was the humor, the mysticism of "becoming one with the dogs", his changing philosophy as he got farther into the training and the race itself. I can't make this review long enough to explain everything he felt and learned, but I was not ready for this book to end, and I was not ready for my own mini emotional breakdown when it did.

Cookie, lead dog extraordinaire, deserves her star billing. In fact, all sled dogs everywhere are superstars, maybe just a cut above our own domesticated pets in intuition and bravado.

For those who don't know, The Iditerod is a grueling race over more than 1200 miles of Alaskan wilderness. It starts in Anchorage and ends in Nome, takes at least a couple of weeks, and once you begin, you're on your own. There are checkpoints and food caches along the way, but no help from anyone but other mushers you might meet, and very strict rules about even that. Every year, racers die, dogs die, whole teams go missing by falling through the ice or getting lost, or freezing to death. It's not for the faint of heart, and for a rookie like Gary Paulsen, is even more dangerous. I am amazed that he lived to tell the tale, and frankly, so was he.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Read it, then pass it along to your husband and children, other relatives, friends, etc. There's something here for everyone.

I loved this book and could not put it down once I got started. I learned so much about sledding and the Iditarod. In particular, I learned that I will never ever run it!

"But the beauty of the woods, the incredible joy of it is too alluring to be ignored, and I could not stand to be away from it--indeed, still can't--and so I ran dogs simply to run dogs; to be in and part of the forest, the woods."

“How can it be to live without the dogs.”

Paulsen is a outdoorsy, kind of guy, living in the wilds of Minnesota, but one day, in his early 40s, he decides to run the Iditarod. A grueling 1,180 miles dog-race, from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska.
This is his memoir, of that event and it is awesome. It is also funny, gripping and terrifying. There is more adventure packed into these pages, that you would find, in a half a dozen other books.
I thought the idea of climbing Mt. Everest, is insane, (it does remind me of Into Thin Air, just not as somber) but this is a whole different kind of madness.
I can not recommend this one high enough and I will be searching out more of his work.

I am not one for reading the nonfiction genre, but I really got into this book. Not only did I learn so much about the things involved in running and preparing for the Iditarod, but I also found myself laughing outloud at the most inappropriate times! Paulsen's style of writing made me smile in one chapter and want to cry in the next one.

I found my "teacher" side coming out quite often as I read. There was more than one chapter that caught my eye for various reasons, but the chapter called "Skwentna" has the very best lead for a flashback kind of story! He also created more snapshots and exploding moments than any other book I have read.

Even though there are some questionable situations and a little foul language, I think this is a wonderful book for a teenage guy to read.

Personal Response
I like Winterdance for the same reason I like the other Gary Paulsen books, because it is about the outdoors. It explains the difference from a place I live to when Brian travels to Alaska for the race. The weather conditions are way more harsh than in Wisconsin.

Plot summary
Brian prepared to run the Iditarod, the longest dog sled race in the world. He started with a small litter of sled pups. He raised them and they seem more like wolves than any kind of dog. He went through many challenges trying to get the few he has to work as a team. He did not have snow either, so he used an old bike as his first off season sled. After getting dragged and then stranded, he decided to use something else. He used an old car he had in his yard, so he could sit in it and have full control and not fall off. As people in his area heard about him preparing for the race, he started getting donations like sleds and more dogs to run with. When all was said and done, he had 15 dogs to run the race with. After long days of training and longer nights sleeping in the kennel, it was time to head north for the race. He had took plenty of money for the trip, but ended up spending it all on tires for the trailer on the way up. When the race started he was dragged through town and got lost until some of the locals pointed him in the right direction. After that, everything went well besides the fact that he did not get much sleep because he was spending his time preparing dog food and checking their paws for any cuts. He started to have hallucinations from sleep loss. When he hallucinated a moose attack, but couldn't find the dogs, he realized he had already bedded them in and made their food. Once he started to get more sleep and overcame the hardest points of the race, everything went smoother. As he got closer to the finish line, he realized he didn't have enough food and had to eat scraps from other mushers at checkpoints. When he got to the finish, the reporter asked him about what he will do next, he said he will win it next year.

Characterization
Brian shows a lot of hope. He has a lot of dedication to the race. He did everything he could to prepare his team of sled dogs, and he never would give up on them no matter how many times he was being dragged behind them.

Setting
The book first took place somewhere in Minnesota where Brian was determined to run the Iditarod in Alaska. He lived in a small cabin in the north with his wife, son, and team of sled dogs. His dogs were an important part of his family, because he treated them that way and even spent a few nights in the kennel. The setting changed as he traveled to Alaska to start the race. The book took place present day. It was important because there was lot of newer tools and aids to help him that he did not use.

Recommendation
I recommend this book to both boys and girls in ninth grade and up who like the outdoors or books about dogs. It has a great outdoor aspect as much as it does about dogs. It shows a great example of hope and kindness, as Brian is always hopeful and is very generous to his dogs.

The YA author Gary Paulsen writes of the chapter in his life where he was obsessed with running sled dogs and ran the Iditarod. He communicates exactly what kind of madness is required to run a 1000+ race from Anchorage to Nome. The madness involves transformation - transformation from human to dog. In the process of becoming dog, he trains dogs and is supported by his wife, Ruth. About Ruth: I'd like to know what kind of drugs she is on (and is she willing to share) to so calmly support her husband's antics with a warm mug of soup and an almost off-handed, "oh, you're back?" attitude when he shows up after being relentlessly attacked by skunks.

The book tracks his training, his amateurish rigs and almost fatal mistakes, and then takes the reader/listener along on the Iditarod with him. He communicates wonder at the landscape that is actively trying to kill him, and never takes himself too seriously. Paulsen, best known for YA wilderness classics like Hatchet, died in October 2021, which makes the end of this book all the more poignant. He is diagnosed with heart disease and has to give up dog racing. However, I read his wikipedia entry which says,

"In 1983, Paulsen entered the 1,150-mile (1,850 km) Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, and placed 41st[19] out of 54 finishers, with an official time of 17 days, 12 hours, 38 minutes, and 38 seconds. In 1990, suffering from heart disease, Paulsen decided to give up dog sledding, which he described as the most difficult decision he had ever made. Paulsen would spend more than a decade sailing the Pacific before getting back into dog sledding in 2003. According to his keynote speech on October 13, 2007, at the Sinclair Lewis writing conference in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, he still intended to compete in the Iditarod. He is listed in the "Withdrawn/Scratched" section of the 1985 and 2006 Iditarod. Paulsen was an outdoorsman (a hunter and trapper), who maintained a 40-acre (160,000 m2) parcel north of Willow, Alaska, where he bred and trained sled dogs for the Iditarod.[15]

So I spent my time with Paulsen marveling at a full life, a person who embraced his animal nature as well as his creative urges, and enjoying the hearing about the fine madness of running the Iditarod from a great storyteller. This is my first book for the Ten Year Clear* and it was an almost perfect choice. Seasonally apt, I listened to Winterdance over the course of our first snowy weekend of the year. It took me a moment to remember why the Me of 2012 had added this and several other books about the running of the Iditarod on my TBR - we had traveled to Alaska in 2011 to celebrate my Mom's 70th birthday and I was nursing a sustained fascination with the landscape that I discovered on our trip. My mom is now 80, my fascination with Alaska as waned somewhat with the passage of time but I remain a lifelong lover of insane adventure narratives, and this book totally delivers that. It prompted me to pull out the photo album of that trip and to try to conjure up the memories of my then-small-children, my then-alive sister-in-law, my then-beardless husband, my then-more-vital mother. I settled on this idea for my reading project mostly as a way of just knocking down my TBR, but I hadn't expected for this to be a portal in time, to the time I went to Alaska and didn't want to leave its wonder behind.

Choosing this book also has the added bonus of freeing me from reading anything else about the Iditarod, so I am removing multiple other titles from my deep TBR, calling that chapter complete.

* The Ten Year Clear is my reading project for 2022. I have 80+ books on my TBR that were added 10 or more years ago. This year, I intend to either read or delete those books from my TBR as a way of embracing an if-not-now-then-when approach while also accepting that I cannot possibly read all the books on my TBR.

What a rollercoaster of emotions I had while reading this book! It was so funny in parts I was laughing out loud and then other parts so scary I was gripping the pages tightly. I found the ending sad but it's a true life story and life doesn't always have happy endings I suppose. I've told a lot of people about this book because I found it so interesting but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for everyone.