Preview of Dancing Carl Summary:

Every adolescent remembers the adults who were his or her most important teachers. Sometimes the most.influential are not the official ones in school, at church, at clubs, or in organized sports. Sometimes the adult who teaches best and influences most is the unlikeliest candidate in town.

Dancing Carl is about the lessons in living and loving that two adolescent boys, Marsh and Willy, learn from Carl Wenstrom. Known to the boys as "Dancing Carl" because of his strange yet graceful movements on the ice rink, he is an unlikely teacher. He often appears drunk in public, seldom changes his clothes, lives in a corner of the warming house at the town skating rink, and is the subject of local gossip.

A hundred rumors fly about him: he is mentally unbalanced because of his war experiences; he drinks because of some deep guilt; he hides some awful criminal...