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. The audiobook narrator Guy Lockard is superb, delivering authentic voices especially for Ghost and the coach. In a weird way, increasing the number of racially diverse books on a given publisher’s release calendar isn’t hard if the publisher is dedicated to the notion.

I have a couple favorites this year (like most years), but this one is almost always the first I mention. Castle's been through a major trauma, and as his self-given nickname--GHOST--suggests, he does his best to move through the world under the radar to avoid trouble. As I've stated in my previous thoughts, Ghost (Castle) is such a complex character and it's through his complexity that readers are truly able to appreciate the story as a whole. 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.

Like Cleary, Jason Reynolds clearly remembers what it was to be a kid — the private humiliations, the silliness, the outsized misconceptions, the way the tiniest bit of support can change a day. Jason Reynolds' dialogue and characters feel so real to me, and when the characters do things, even things I don't particularly like, as Ghost does at one point in this story, I follow along, knowing Reynolds will take me on an interesting journey. This is a generalization, but in my experience librarians really enjoy reading within their comfort zones.

Ghost touches on thievery, drug abuse, gun violence, bullying, honesty, family dynamics, friendship, and finding healthy ways to channel anger and hurt into positive action. But the craziest thing was, I felt like the shot—loudest sound I ever heard—made my legs move even faster.

His character is so authentic, you wouldn’t be surprised if he walked straight off the page, living and breathing. Those are the most obvious examples, but the book is full of little mentions, peppered throughout, of where Ghost’s class comes in to things. Jason Reynolds does an amazing job of getting this kid's heart onto the page, and even when you're like "Nooooo, Ghost! When I served on a yearly committee of librarians in New York I’d notice that some books were difficult to get anyone to read. 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.

both cowritten with Jason Griffin); and Long Way Down, which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor. S was furious that he didn’t get to find out the result, but again, we talked about why this was and what the focus of the story was.And that’s when I looked back and saw him, my dad, staggering from the bedroom, his lips bloody, a pistol in his hand. It shows them how to face those challenges in an approachable way, and I love that it features characters who look like my kids and that they can directly relate to.

After earning a BA in English from The University of Maryland, College Park, Jason Reynolds moved to Brooklyn, New York, where you can often find him walking the four blocks from the train to his apartment talking to himself.Y'all probably won't catch me reviewing another middle grade novel, but just know, this book was an exception for a reason. What do you think Ghost means when he tells Coach, “I guess the only other person I’m really scared of, maybe . 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.