Review
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Sunny Lancaster is a home-schooled almost-13-year-old torn
between duty to run and passion for dance in the latest
compulsively readable installment of Reynolds' lauded Track
series. On the surface, African-American Sunny appears to have a
wealthy, comfortable life that his less-fortunate teammates on
the Defenders cannot help but envy. Privilege, however, cannot
hide pain, and Sunny feels smothered by guilt over his mother's
death immediately after his birth and crushed beneath the weight
of his her's expectations for him to become the marathon
runner that his beloved mother no longer can be. Once again,
Reynolds cements his reputation as a distinguished chronicler of
the adolescent condition by presenting readers with a
winsome-yet-complex character whose voice feels as fresh as it is
distinctive, spontaneously breaking out into onomatopoeic riffs
that underscore his sense of music and rhythm. Living in an empty
house with colorless walls and unfulfilled familial expectations
cannot dim the effervescent nature of a protagonist who names his
diary to make it feel more personal, employs charts and graphs to
help him find the bravery to forge his own path as a
discus-throwing dancer, and finds artistic inspiration in the
musical West Side Story. Defenders introduced in earlier novels
receive scant , but new characters, such as Sunny's
blue-haired teacher/dance instructor, Aurelia, are vibrant and
three-dimensional. Main characters' races are not explicitly
mentioned, implying a black default. Another literary pacesetter
that will leave Reynolds' readers wanting more. (Fiction. 10-14)
(Kirkus STARRED REVIEW 4/15/18)
Sunny is one of the best runners you have ever seen. But the
problem, see, is that he doesn’t want to run. His mother was a
runner, and after she died giving birth to him, his her Darryl
decided that Sunny would run to carry on the legacy. But if you
carry anything long enough, you begin to stagger under its
weight. What Sunny really wants to do is dance. He and his
home-school teacher—a colored-haired, tattooed woman named
Aurelia—dance for the cancer ward patrons at a local hospital.
Coach even lets him quit running and starts giving him one-on-one
discus lessons, which feels a lot like dancing. But Darryl thinks
Sunny is betraying his mother’s memory. Reynolds again uses his
entrancing grasp of voice to pull readers into the heartbreaking
world of the Track series. Sunny’s voice is deliberately more
scattered and onomatopoetic than the series’ prior narrators, and
there’s a musicality to the text, with words like “tickboom” and
“hunger-growl.“ As with Ghost (2016)and Patina (2017), this book
functions equally well as a standalone—in this case, a boy with
rhythm flowing deeply through his s—while also continuing to
deepen the world of this inner-city middle-school track team.
This series continues to provide beautiful rtunities for
discussion about viewpoint, privilege, loss, diversity of
experience, and exactly how much we don’t know about those around
us. — Becca Worthington (Booklist *STARRED REVIEW* May 1, 2018)
Sunny is deeply dissatisfied with his performance on the
Defenders track team. He always wins, nobody cares much about the
mile race until its closing seconds, and besides, he’d rather
dance. Aurelia, the dear friend of Sunny’s deceased mother,
recognizes this as she homeschools him, and she knows how rhythm,
rhyme, grief, and misplaced guilt (his mother died giving birth
to him) fill his mind and spill out in his movements. Darryl,
Sunny’s her, doesn’t get it, though, and he’s completely
thrown off when Sunny just stops in the middle of a race—to let
someone else win for a change and to send out a cri de coeur.
Coach then suggests he take a break from the mile and try discus
throw, a field event whose graceful, disciplined spin and release
might better suit Sunny. Book Three of Reynolds’ Track series,
with its focus on individual players and their personal
struggles, does not disappoint. Fans will settle easily into the
balance between field action, teammate interrelationships,
Coach’s understated but effective methodology, and the open-ended
conclusion underscoring the message that win/loss is less
important in these players’ lives than camaraderie and family
reconciliation. (BCCB June 2018)
As in Reynolds’s two previous novels in the Track series (Ghost,
rev. 11/16; Patina, rev. 11/17), sports aren’t really the point
here—certainly not for Sunny, the team’s best miler, who decides,
just as he’s about to win a race, that he doesn’t want to be a
runner and, in fact, never did. Coach’s subsequent suggestion
that he take up the discus instead is cannily reflected in the
novel’s structure, a series of diary entries that each spin
around another incident or memory, cumulatively revealing the
tragic origins of Sunny’s track career. The incantatory leanings
of the prose sometimes tend toward repetitiveness, but the slow
build of the story allows Sunny’s strengths and vulnerabilities
to gain him a place in our hearts. When he finally throws the
discus in competition—on the last page, no less—we are completely
with him. (Horn Book Magazine July/August 2018)
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About the Author
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Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author, a
Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, National Book
Award Honoree, a Kirkus Award winner, a two-time Walter Dean
Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the
recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. The American
Booksellers Association’s 2017 and 2018 spokesperson for Indies
First, his many books include When I Was the Greatest, Boy in the
Black Suit, All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely), As
Brave as You, For Every One, the Track series
(Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu), and Long Way Down, which received
both a Newbery Honor and a Printz Honor. He lives in Washington,
DC. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Sunny
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1
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Friday
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Dear Diary,
It’s been a while. And because you’re back, because I brought you
back (after spiraling your back back into place)—backity back
back back—Aurelia, for some reason, feels like she needs to be
introduced to you all over again. Like she don’t know you. Like
she don’t remember you. But I do. So we don’t have to shake hands
and do the whole “my name is” thing. But Aurelia might need to do
that. Today she asked me if I still call you Diary, or if I call
you Journal now. Or maybe . I told her Diary. I’ve always
called you that. Because I like Diary. , no. And Dear
Journal doesn’t really work the same. Doesn’t do it for me. Dear
Diary is better, not just because of the double D alliteration
action, but also because Diary reminds me of the name Darryl, so
at least I feel like I’m talking to an actual someone. And Darryl
reminds me of the word “dairy,” and “dairy” and “diary” are the
same except for where i is. And I like dairy. At least milk. I
can’t drink a lot of it, which you know, because it makes my
stomach feel like it’s full of glue, which you also know. But I
like it anyway. Because I’m weird. Which you definitely know. You
know I like weird stuff. And everything about milk is weird. Even
the word “milk,” which I think probably sounds like what milk
sounds like when you guzzle it. Milkmilkmilkmilkmilk. I should
start over.
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