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Review ------ 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) Read more ( javascript:void(0) ) About the Author ---------------- 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. Read more ( javascript:void(0) ) Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. -------------------------------------------------------- Sunny - 1 - ------ Friday ------ 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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