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How Angel Peterson Got His Name by Gary Paulsen

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. (November 2004)

As a teenage boy growing up. in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, Gary Paulsen--famed author of Hatchet (1986, MacMillan), Soldier's Heart (1998, Delacorte), and many more young adult novels--was never at a loss for ways to entertain himself. At age 13, he sealed himself in a wooden pickle barrel and attempted to shoot the 12-foot waterfall in town.

His problems started when he discovered the barrel wouldn't float but ended when the

barrel fell 12 feet only to land on a sharp boulder and splinter into assorted pieces.  Extreme sports were born. Paulsen and his friends did not have any of the expensive  and fancy gear available from catalogs and high-end stores that teenagers have today,  but they did have a veritable smorgasbord of adventure equipment available for next to nothing at the local army surplus store. Parachutes, rubber rafts, fighter plane target kites, possibly even whole jeeps (disassembled and packed in grease, according to popular legend) could be had cheaply there. Paulsen acknowledges the equipment as the genuine article from the battlefield; he even had a canteen with a bullet hole right through it

Angel Peterson, whose real name is (or was) Carl, got his sobriquet from remarks he made after breaking the land-speed record for snow skiing. Carl and the gang convince a local hot-rodder to pull Carl (about to become Angel) behind his souped-up car until they cruise on past the speed record and into the history and record books. The conditions are perfect on the day they make the attempt, but Carl has a slight equipment breakdown halfway through the run, and when the tow rope entangles the thumbs of his mittens (army surplus mittens, of course), he appears to give a permanent thumbs up to more speed. The boys break the record at 82'k miles per hour, and after they dig Carl out of the snow where he has been embedded, he tells them that he thought he heard the angels singing when he was careening at high speeds and. Paulsen or one

scared beyond belief. From that point on Carl would be known as Angel

of his buddies at one time or another attempted a litany of crazy stunts, including jumping off a water tower with an army surplus parachute (now called "base jumping" in extreme sports), getting airborne on an army surplus fighter plane target kite (hang gliding), skateboarding, bear wrestling, and many others. 

It's hard to say which is funnier, the facts of the stories themselves or the way that Gary  Paulsen tells them. He has a way of putting the reader right there with him so that the sights and sounds come through clearly and loudly. Paulsen looks at adolescence with a large dose of good humor. We can almost see him shaking his head and laughing in disbelief at the insanity of teenage behavior as he dedicated the book to "all boys in their thirteenth year; the miracle is that we live through it" (p. v).

source: http://www.newberry.k12.sc.us/nbhs/literacypage/Middle%20SChool%20Book%20Reviews.pdf