But they are also four kids chosen for an elite middle school running team-a team that could qualify them for the Junior Olympics if they can get their acts together. I have to say that as someone who has very little interest in sports, I was surprised at how much I liked this story about a 13-year-old urban black kid Castle Crenshaw, aka “Ghost,” joining a track team.

I don’t know a whole lot about sunflowers, but I know they’re pretty and girls like them, and I know the word sunflower is made up of two good words, and that man ain’t got two good words in him, or anything that any girl would like, because girls don’t like men who try to shoot them and their son. The book received starred reviews from Booklist, [3] Publishers Weekly, [4] and Kirkus, [1] as well as positive reviews from The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books and Horn Book Magazine.This book is the first of Jason Reynolds’s middle grade series about track, and what a beginning this is.

Every other night he would become a different person, like he’d morph into someone crazy, but this one night my mother decided to finally fight back. But he's not just running toward the finish line, he's running away from his past and the anger he's got buried inside. His voice seemed like an adult trying to disguise his life lessons by making them come from a kid who uses hip vernacular. He is bullied for not having the right kit and made to feel inferior to the other children on the team, and this leads him to make some poor choices.Mike Lupica and Tim Green may rule the field but that doesn’t mean other people don’t make a lot out of athletics. Coach stands in brilliant contract to Ghost's father (who is at the center of the trauma Ghost has suffered), and when HIS backstory is finally revealed, the story coheres into this perfect, multifaceted-diamond start to what is sure to be an incredible middle grade series. Right at the start, almost like it’s some kind of superhero origin story, we hear how Ghost heard the gun go off that night he ran away from his home with his mom and “I felt like the loud shot made my legs move even faster. Even Ghost, ESPECIALLY Ghost, who makes you want to yell and him and cheer for him, sometimes at the same time. Though he experiences family trauma, resulting in his father going to prison, and has committed a crime himself, the reader can tell he is sensitive and has a conscience.

The writing in this novel made me feel like I was 10 again, and I was just a little kid who liked to read books about sports.I had my head sandwiched between the mattress and my pillow, something I got used to doing whenever they were going at it, when my mom crashed into my bedroom. I had such high hopes for this book to be a companion read to The Crossover by Kwame Alexander with my 6th graders. In a world where men from countries in Africa have the world records in foot-speed, shouldn't we have teen fiction modeling that? Then there’s a cliffhanger where it was a big race and the starting gun fired great and that was the ending!