There’s been a monumental push for increased diversity in children’s literature in the last few years.

KIRKUS REVIEWS; "Reynolds (As Brave As You) uses a light hand to delve into topics that include gun violence, class disparity, and bullying in this compelling series opener. Can Ghost harness his raw talent for speed and meld with the team, or will his past finally catch up to him? In a world where men from countries in Africa have the world records in foot-speed, shouldn't we have teen fiction modeling that?Closely read the last few pages of Chapter 5 and the beginning of Chapter 6, making sure to pay attention to the author’s use of figurative language. And that’s when I looked back and saw him, my dad, staggering from the bedroom, his lips bloody, a pistol in his hand.

When preparing the district teen booklist, my coworker was in charge of including Running/Track books. I did a book talk for each of the books and handed them copies of each to read the first couple of pages. One of the central conflicts in the novel involves Ghost’s desire to acquire an expensive pair of running shoes. 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. When Ghost stumbles onto a local track team and decides to show them a thing or two (they think they can run?Charles can barely hear a thing, which is why he’s always yelling at everybody and everybody’s always yelling at him. He’s got a load of anger inside that he doesn’t know how to deal with so he tends to take it out on others at school. Ghost and his mother are not well off; his father attempted to shoot them one drunken night, and Ghost retains a certain amount of fear and desire to run from that traumatic night.