Ghost (RUN SERIES): 1

Product Information

Reynolds was named the American Booksellers Association’s 2017 and 2018 spokesperson for Indies First, and served as the national spokesperson for the 2018 celebration of School Library Month in April 2018, sponsored by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). And there are other books in this series, with stories told from the other newbies' perspectives, so I'm pretty excited. When I was really young, I used to ask him if a sunflower was going to grow inside of him since he ate the seeds so much.

We are often affected by forces outside our control, forces we don’t even necessarily notice, particularly when we’re children. He is on faculty at Lesley University, for the Writing for Young People MFA Program and lives in Washington, DC.Without thinking about it twice Ghost beats the guy on the track, running on the outside, which gets the attention of the coach. The novel opens with Ghost regaling the reader on his favourite Guinness World record facts, before cleanly segueing into his love for sunflower seeds stemming from his.

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. Despite the fact that the protagonist, Castle, is a dirt-poor black kid and I grew up in a middle-class white family, I could identify so strongly him--with his overpowering black and red emotions--that I was transported back my own sometimes challenging middle school years. More than just a sports story, it was a sensitive, realistic look at a young person dealing with trauma and trying to avoid the crushing effects of racism, poverty, and abuse. Ghost would be at home both in a middle grade and YA section, and thus is of interest to pre-teens and younger teens, especially ones who will see some aspect of their own lives reflected in Ghost’s. One of the central conflicts in the novel involves Ghost’s desire to acquire an expensive pair of running shoes.

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. It is the first book of Reynold's Track series, followed by Patina (2017), Sunny (2018), and Lu (2018).

Coach tells Ghost that he wants to show him, “You can’t run away from who you are, but what you can do is run toward who you want to be. A total delight from start to finish, Ghost is a deceptively simple story about 13-year-old urban black kid Castle Crenshaw, aka “Ghost. Coach gives him some much needed direction, and helps to guide him, and he ends the book in a much more positive place than he started. Ghost, otherwise known as Castle Crenshaw, is a boy on the run, a kid who runs fast and doesn’t look back.

When Ghost stumbles onto a local track team and decides to show them a thing or two (they think they can run? I did a book talk for each of the books and handed them copies of each to read the first couple of pages. Now Jason Reynolds, a young adult author until this year, has produced a middle grade novel centered on that must unlikely of sports: track. He’s never thought about running, but he joins the track team and it gives him a focus and a way to work through his difficult feelings.

He’s also hard of hearing, which when my mom used to say this, I always thought she was saying “harder hearing,” which made no sense at all to me.Charles, who, by the way, looks just like James Brown if James Brown were white, has been ringing me up for sunflower seeds five days a week for about, let me think… since the fourth grade, which is when Ma took the hospital job. The one grip and it's a good grip is that the book leads up to the 1st track meet and he leaves us hanging. I used to just put a whole bunch of them in my mouth at the same time, suck all the salt off, then spit them all out machine-gun-style.