Ghost (Jason Reynolds)

Ghost
The Track series, Book 1
Jason Reynolds
Athenium
Fiction, MG General Fiction
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Middle-schooler Castle "Ghost" Cranshaw's been running for much of his young life. Sometimes it seems he never stopped running after his father tried to shoot him and his mother in their own apartment. Since then, it's been one long race away from the past, away from the pain, away from the shame of living in a poor part of town and seeing his mother work herself to exhaustion, away from jerks at school. But he's never had anything to run towards, until one day he's down at the park and sees a group of kids about his age running on purpose.
Before he saw the Defenders, Ghost didn't even know track was a real thing. Now, he just might have found a place where he doesn't have to run away or act out. Who knows? Maybe someday he'll be great at something and set a world record, like his friend at the corner store always says he will. But Ghost has had a lot of practice being on his own, and not much being on a team. Can a kid like him really find a better life and a better future with better friends, or is he doomed to keep running away from himself, all alone?

REVIEW: The first in a series about the runners of the Defenders track club, Ghost reads (appropriately) fast, yet still manages to build solid characters with some complexity and conflict to them. From the start, Ghost struggles to find a place and a way to fit in, hanging out at the edges of city basketball courts hoping to be chosen for a pick-up game, but he already has strikes against him with where he lives and what happened with his father. He already has a "file" in school, and it almost seems inevitable that that file will transmute into a police record when he's older... until he stumbles across the track meet and realizes he can do something other than hang out on the fringes or get pushed and bullied into exploding. The coach is initially a bit skeptical of this kid who turns up out of nowhere and unofficially challenges his best young sprinter to a race, but sees something in Ghost that the boy scarcely sees in himself... something Ghost ends up endangering, ironically, because of his keen desire to fit in with the other Defenders. In the coach, Ghost finds the father figure that was lacking even when his biological father was around, for all that Ghost doesn't really hate his dad; mixed feelings about difficult parents and authority figures form a theme through the book, which gives grown-ups more nuance than some middle-grade titles manage. There are no flat villains here, and there are no flat heroes, either, just humans coping (or failing to cope) with various obstacles and burdens and goals, even if they don't always cope healthily or well. Everyone has some secrets and shades of grey about them, mixed emotions and impulses that sometimes lead to mistakes. It's learning to step up and acknowledge mistakes, atoning for and learning from them, that separates the child from the adult, the boy from the man (for all that it's a test some grown men fail). As Ghost immerses in the world of track and the first truly supportive peer group he's found on his own, he at last is able to face his own demons, the ones he's been running from for years.
I ended up adding an extra star for how it managed to pack so much story into such a relatively short package without ever feeling overcrowded or infodumpy or tipping over the line into melodrama. By the end, everyone in the story, even relatively minor characters, felt like people, not just names on a page (or in the air, as I listened to the audiobook). I might actually try finding the other books in the series, and I didn't think I'd ever say that about a sports-based fiction book.

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