The night fifteen-year-old Will's brother Shawn is gunned down in the street, the boy knows just what to do with the grief tearing his heart out.
There are Rules for this, taught to him by Shawn, who learned it from others: don't cry, don't snitch, and always take revenge. Will didn't see who
pulled the trigger, but he's pretty sure he knows who, and he has the gun Shawn left behind in their shared room. Full of rage and fear and confusion,
Will leaves his apartment and takes the elevator to the lobby, intent on following the Rules and exacting his revenge - only to find a dead uncle
stepping aboard at the next floor, and another ghost on the one after... It's a long way down to the lobby, and even longer when the dead must have
their say.
Review
I listened to the audiobook (read by the author) at work, not quite sure what to expect from such a relatively short piece. The free-form verse
tells a story of anger and fear and pain and a self-perpetuating cycle of ultimately pointless payback that destroys lives long after the original
injustice (if indeed there was one) has been forgotten. Will has known pain since before he can remember, and known death on a personal level at least
as long, as friends and family members have been claimed by the violence that poisons his world like smog. The only way he knows how to deal with
grief is by following the Rules that led to the grief in the first place. The ghostly visitors show the scope of the horrors that have encompassed his
life since childhood, horrors he never thinks to question until looking into the faces of death all around him. The nightmarish elevator ride has
shades of Dickens, but only if all the ghosts were as grim as the Ghost of Christmas Future, with as little hope of salvation. Does Will understand what
they're saying, by the end? Is it already too late for him by the time he steps into the elevator car with his brother's gun tucked into his waistband?
Did he ever have a choice but to eventually join them, whether today or tomorrow or next year, as the Rules play out endlessly around him, claiming
more lives that create more killers that claim more lives? The ending leaves Will's choice and fate unspecified, but there is no doubt that the visions
have made him fundamentally reassess his world. It's a powerful, harrowing tale.
The audiobook I listened to included a brief interview with the author, wherein he describes the inspirations for the tale and mentions his own dislike
of ebooks, where readers can change font sizes and such in ways that, to his mind, ruin the impact and flow of his verse in an unacceptable way. The
ability to change font sizes and types is one of the benefits of ereader devices for people with visual impairments or other issues. For some reason,
this broad-brush dismissal irked me subtly. Other than that, the interview (more of a monologue wherein he answered his own questions) was reasonably
interesting, though, adding depth and background to the story.
The Track series, Book 1 Jason Reynolds Athenium Fiction, MG General Fiction Themes: Diversity, Schools, Urban Tales ****+
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.
