Ghost (RUN SERIES): 1

Product Information

both cowritten with Jason Griffin); and Long Way Down, which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor.

Ghost has a lot of other stuff going on in his life that are obstacles to his success: the reason his dad’s in jail (for shooting at him and his mom), the fact that his mom’s overworked and they’re still poor, and a whole lot of anger. I’ve been trying to read some boys marketed to boys to round out my librarian knowledge and this was a great start.In addition to training the Defenders to be competitive runners, Coach also teaches them to work together as a team, helping them learn to be responsible and empathetic. Can Ghost harness his raw talent for speed and meld with the team, or will his past finally catch up to him? Ma said the cops said that when they got to the house, he was sitting outside on the steps, shirtless, with the pistol beside him, guzzling beer, eating sunflower seeds, waiting.

I doubt anyone has ever run any statistics on it, but if you were to gather together all the children’s sports books and group them by type, the baseball books would undoubtedly outweigh all the others 2:1. This is a book that actually made me tear up, and there aren’t a lot of middle grade books that do that. When preparing the district teen booklist, my coworker was in charge of including Running/Track books. 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.The sound was big, and sharp enough to make me feel like my brain was gonna pop in my head, enough to make my heart hiccup. It also doesn’t provide easy answers, or present sports as a magical solution for black teen boys, and it resists tropes associated with this kind of narrative. Work with your physical education department to organize a Ghost-inspired class, trying out some of the training exercises and races. He is on faculty at Lesley University, for the Writing for Young People MFA Program and lives in Washington, DC. 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.

Then, one day, Ghost comes across a practice in the park and decides to race one of the sprinters, a decision that leads him to join Coach Brody’s elite track team: the Defenders. He knows because when his dad came at him and his mother on one violent night, running was the only way to get away. But now, after challenging a sprinter to a race at the local track, he’s won himself a place on an elite running team. This book was just as good as I remembered and definitely one that needs to be in the hands in as many kids as possibly. This book was heartfelt and definitely teaches kids a great lesson about not letting certain situations define your character.See, the gym across the street has this big window—like the whole wall is a window—and they have those machines that make you feel like you walking up steps and so everybody just be facing the bus stop, looking all crazy like they’re about to pass out. Of middle-grade education professionals and middle-grade novel enjoyers, I am definitely in the minority of this one.

But the craziest thing was, I felt like the shot—loudest sound I ever heard—made my legs move even faster. Ghost isn’t destitute or anything but his single mom makes ends meet by working long hours at a hospital. Twelve-year-old AJ lives within a stone’s throw of the London Stadium, and his dream is to one day run there.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.