How Sunny stands up for what he wants to do and how his Coach helps him chart a new path is both heart-warming and inspiring. However, he knows this decision will disappoint everyone around him, especially his father. He wants to quit and dance instead-something his mother (who died when he was born) loved to do almost as much as run.
He is the fastest 1600 runner on the team, but Sunny hates running. However, Sunny knows he has started to write because he is about to do something very scary. Sunny has started writing to his diary again and his tutor, Aurelia, who home schools him, thinks it’s a great idea. According to Sunny, the diary entries started when he was a kid and his father, Darryl, was trying to quiet him down Darryl gave him the notebook to encourage him “to put the noise on your pages” and Sunny’s writing habit began.
#Patina track series series#
It’s not that Sunny is my favorite character, but his book is told in a series of diary entries and they pull you into his world and point of view harder than any of the others. Though I loved all three books, this one was my favorite. Reynolds does a great job getting us to feel the pressure Patty feels as she tries to be a role model for her little sister, to deal with the death of her father and her mother’s illness, and to slowly let her guard down with her classmates and her teammates. Luckily, she has the support of her newbie teammates-Ghost, Sunny, and Lu. She also has the challenge of having to train for a relay with three other girls on the team who she doesn’t know very well. All this is not made any easier by the fact that now Patty has to attend a new school-one that is private and posh and where her classmates seem to live in a different world. Though moving in with her uncle and “Momly” has some upsides, Patty feels cut off from both her mom, who she only sees every Sunday, and from her best friend from the neighborhood, Cotton. She and her younger sister, Maddy, have recently been taken in by her uncle and aunt because her mother’s diabetes has worsened to the point that her mother has lost both her legs and cannot care for her daughters. Patina “Patty” Jones runs like the wind on the track but it is the issues off the track that are weighing her down. Since I read them in one big chunk, it only makes sense to review them together. Score! It took me a couple weeks to get to them, but each one went down quickly and I found myself really liking how Reynolds crafted the books to both fit together and stand alone and how walking (or running) in the shoes of the four new members of the Defenders track team made for an engaging experience. He’s a prolific writer, so catching up and keeping up will take some work.įlash forward to mid-December when I discovered a display of the remaining three books in the Track series at my community college’s library-just as I was turning in my final grades and getting ready to go on break.
I had seen Jason Reynolds on The Daily Show, started following him on Twitter, and all that made me want to read his work-all of his work.
Last February I read Ghost, the first book in Jason Reynold’s middle grade Track series and enjoyed it immensely though I understood I was definitely not the intended audience.
0 kommentar(er)
