Mudshark

by Gary Paulsen Narrated by Tasso Feldman

Overview

Mudshark is the go-to guy for any mysteries that need solving. Lost your shoe? Can't find your homework? Ask Mudshark. That is, until the Psychic Parrot takes up residence in the school library and threatens to overturn Mudshark's position as the guy who knows all the answers. The word in school is that the parrot can out-think Mudshark. And right now, the school needs someone who's good at solving problems. There's an escaped gerbil running rampant, an emergency in the faculty restroom, and all the erasers are disappearing from the classrooms.

When Mudshark solves the mystery of who's stealing the erasers, he discovers the culprit has the best of intentions. Now he has to think of a way to prevent the Psychic Parrot from revealing the eraser-thief's identity. With a bit of misdirection and a lot of quick thinking, Mudshark restores order to the chaos . . . just for the moment.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Without even trying, Mudshark is a very cool 12-year-old (he acquired his nickname after wowing his peers with lightning-speed reflexes during a game of Death Ball ("a kind of soccer mixed with football and wrestling and rugby and mudfighting"). He is mentally quick as well: his powers of observation and photographic memory enable him to tell kids where to find misplaced possessions. But when the school librarian acquires an apparently psychic parrot, Mudshark's role is threatened. This, he reluctantly admits, "rattled his cool," and he is determined to discover the whereabouts of the missing blackboard erasers before the parrot does, a feat that entails crafty and comical maneuverings. Additional diversions (chapters open with dispatches from the principal, offering updates on a loose gerbil and an escalating crisis in the faculty restroom) keep this compact story quick and light. Yet three-time Newbery Honor author Paulsen (Hatchet) delves deeper, shaping Mudshark as a credible and compassionate protagonist, despite his improbable abilities and the even more improbable situations that arise at his off-kilter school. Which makes this clever novel all the cooler. Ages 8-12. (May)

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School Library Journal

Gr 3-6

His reflexes honed chasing triplet toddler sisters, Lyle Williams, 12, earned the nickname Mudshark during an especially fierce game of Death Ball. He relishes reading and observing the world as much as he enjoys sports, and his memory for finding lost articles wins him the prestige of unofficial school detective. The inevitable trouble in paradise occurs when the librarian's psychic parrot threatens his reputation. Mudshark decides that he can simultaneously neutralize the bird and solve a missing-eraser problem with a little help from a wacky assortment of classmates. The principal's intercom announcements that introduce each chapter may cause teary-eyed chortles ("Please refrain from forming hunting parties to hunt the gerbil"). Paulsen presents readers with the unabashedly entertaining machinations of Mudshark, lone bastion of sanity in the midst of school chaos. Fresh and light with scads of humor, this is a tale that doesn't take itself too seriously. That said, the episodes of school-borne mischief hit their target audience just right. Themes of community, literacy, and determination find an oddly snug fit alongside radioactive faculty restrooms and crayfish population explosions. Use this as a classroom read-aloud or hand it to children who like quick reads with strong vocabulary. Fatten those lean humor sections with this slim charmer.-Caitlin Augusta, The Darien Library, CT

Kirkus Reviews

Paulsen's peppy, lightweight new classroom comedy about a super-sharp kid is meant to amuse, and it does. Set in a slightly surreal school populated by a host of idiosyncratic but identifiable character types, the story, told in the third person, revolves around the ever resourceful Mudshark, a boy blessed with perfect recall, lightning-fast reflexes and a good heart. Because of these attributes, everyone at school depends on Mudshark's whizzy brain until the librarian gets an all-seeing (and unfortunately always belching) parrot. Will the parrot eclipse Mudshark as school detective? Not the most profound question in the universe perhaps, but one that boys should delight in. The funniest part of the story is the principal's announcements ordering the superintendant to report to the faculty restroom with an increasingly dire list of equipment that runs from large stick to Geiger counter, and the most touching is the super's meditation on the impermanence of thought. Add in the mystery of the missing erasers, a bored cat and a course of aversion therapy, and it equals fun. (Fiction. 8-12)

From the Publisher

Review, FamilyFun, June 2009:
"A master of lively, highly accessible prose, Paulsen offers much in this short read, from kooky characters to stringent satire."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172530777
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	01/20/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged
Age Range:	8 - 11 Years

Read an Excerpt

This is the principal. Would the custodian please report to the faculty restroom with a plunger . . . no, wait . . . a shovel and a plunger? And has anybody seen the gerbil from room two oh six?   The Mudshark was cool.   Not because he said he was cool or knew he was or thought it. Not because he tried or even cared.   He just was.   Kind of tall, kind of thin, with a long face, brown eyes and hair and a quick smile that jumped out and went back. When he walked down a hall he didn't just walk, he seemed to move as a part of the hall. He'd suddenly appear out of nowhere, as if he'dalways been there.   Wasn't there.   Then there.   His real name was Lyle Williams and for most of his twelve-year-old life people had just called him Lyle.   But one day, when he'd been playing Death Ball—a kind of soccer mixed with football and wrestling and rugby and mudfighting, a citywide, generations-old obsession that had been banned from school property because of, according to the principal, CertainInsurance Restrictions and Prohibitions Owing to Alarming Health Risks Stemming from the Inhalation and Ingestion of Copious Amounts of Mud—he'd been tripped. Everyone thought he was down for the count, flat on his back, covered in mud. Just then, a runner-kicker-wrestler-mudfightercame too close to him, streaking downfield with the ball, and one of Lyle's hands snaked out and caught the runner by an ankle.   "So fast, it was like a mudshark," Billy Crisper said later. He always watched the animal channel. "Mudsharks lie in the mud and when something comes by, they grab it so fast that even high-speed cameras can't catch it. I didn't even see his hand move,I didn't see so much as a blur."   After that game, no one called him Lyle.   Mudshark's agility had been honed at home, courtesy of his triplet baby sisters—Kara, Sara and Tara. Once they started crawling, his father said that all heck broke loose, because nothing moves faster than a tiny, determined toddler heading toward a breakableor swallowable object. If Mudshark had only had one little sister or maybe even two, his reflexes wouldn't have been so keen, but living under the same roof as three mobile units at one time had increased his range of motion and speed exponentially.   One night after dinner when they were about seven months old, the babies had been placed on a blanket on the floor and were playing with soft toys. Mudshark was doing his homework at the desk in the corner of the family room and his parents were watchingthe news and, frankly, dozing on the couch.   Out of the corner of his eye, Mudshark saw a pink flash.   His head whipped around. Two babies were sitting on the blanket, looking toward the door to the hallway. Two, but not three. His parents were half asleep and he didn't want to disturb them. As he leapt silently to his feet and took a step toward the door,he saw two pink streaks darting past him in the same direction. Mudshark reached out and grabbed both babies by the back of their overalls as they crawled after their more adventurous sister. He scooped them up and tucked one under each arm in one fell swoop,heading out of the room toward the rogue baby.   Down the hall toward the kitchen, he saw a little rosebud-covered bottom (a quick glance at the faces he had clutched under his arms told him that Tara had made the first break) rounding the corner to the guest room. He took long strides toward her, Karaand Sara cooing at the jouncy ride. When he got to the guest room, he stared down at Tara, who had found one of the dog's squeezy toys and was happily gumming it (EEY-ah, EEY-ah . . . ). Three babies, two arms.   He shifted the two girls he was holding to his left side, sliding his arm through their overall straps as if he were slinging a backpack over his forearm. They hung there, gurgling, while he bent over and plucked Tara off the floor.   Mudshark and his wriggling crew returned to the family room, where his parents slept peacefully, unaware that the triplets had discovered mobility.   From that moment on, Mudshark did everything he could to anticipate their moves and keep them out of trouble. He stood guard between the triplets and electrical outlets (there had been a close call with Tara, a Barbie doll and a surge protector), the dogbowl (Sara was especially fond of kibble) and   the cat box (Mudshark made a flying leap across the room the first time he saw Kara sitting next to the litter box, reaching a small hand toward the mysterious clumps she saw. He snatched her up before she connected). Yes, he owed his speed and attentionto detail to Kara, Sara and Tara.   But the way he moved wasn't why Mudshark was cool.   And it wasn't his clothes. Sometimes his outfit fit in with the way everybody else dressed and sometimes it didn't. Once, he wore a green wool sweater that had a yellow leather diamond stamped with the head of a poodle in the middle of the chest. It wasas ugly as broken teeth chewing rotten meat, but by the end of the day everybody in school wished they had a green wool sweater with a yellow leather diamond and a poodle on it, too.   That's how cool Mudshark was.   It didn't matter to Mudshark what they called him or that he wasn't allowed to play Death Ball anymore because of how badly he'd frightened the other players with his fast moves (Death Ball was not known to require cunning or quickness, just the bruteforce and raw grit necessary to last the four quarters of, as parents and other adults shudderingly referred to it, That Game). Mudshark knew cool wasn't in how you moved or a name or clothes or whether or not you were asked to play on anyone's team.   It was all in the way your thoughts ran through your mind, the way you managed the flow of electrical charges jumping from one brain cell to another to form ideas.   That's what makes somebody who they are. And that's why Mudshark was so cool.   He thought.   While everyone else was hanging out or goofing off or playing video games or listening to music or watching TV or walking down the hallway in a funk or texting each other or surfing the Net, he was observing the people and objects and sights and scenesaround him.   Thinking.   Once, when he was just five and a half years old, he went up to his mother and said:   "Mom, I think all the time."   "About what?"   "Everything." Deep breath, let it out, sigh.   "What are you thinking about right now?"   "Fingernails grow exactly four times faster than toenails, but it's not like we need toenails because we don't even use them for scratching and did you know that an octopus doesn't even have toenails . . ." He sighed again, and as he turned to walk away,he said, "It makes a man think."   He also read all the time. His mother was the lead research coordinator at the public library, and from the time he was very tiny, she'd brought him to work with her, setting him on the floor behind her desk with a stack of books she'd absentmindedly pulledfrom the nearest shelf—never picture books or easy readers, but books on astronomy and astrophysics and the history of democracy and the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. He'd learned to read before he went to kindergarten and was always carrying twoor three books with him. He only had to read a page once to be able to quote from it word for word.   As he grew older, his memory became better because of the way he learned to pay attention to every sight, smell, taste and sound every minute of every day. As with any skill, practice made him more proficient, and over time, he'd developed a nearly photographicmemory.   Eventually people noticed his knack for quoting obscure facts and remembering tiny details, and when a kid at school had a question or problem, someone would say "Ask Mudshark."   "Hey, Mudshark," Markie McCorkin said, "I lost my homework!"   And Mudshark remembered him sitting by the steps in front of the school where two small kids had been playing with a ball, a yellow ball, that they'd thrown in the bushes back of where Markie sat. One of them had accidentally kicked Markie's orange folderso that his homework papers, held together with a red paper clip, fell out of the folder while he was telling Todd DeClouet about the new tires on his bicycle and how well they gripped in dirt, although not as well as he'd thought they might.   And Markie ran to the front bushes and sure enough, his homework was there. Exactly where Mudshark had said it would be.  

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