By Jason Reynolds
A boy who's spent his whole life running from a bad night gets pulled onto an elite track team, and starts to wonder if he could be running toward something instead.
Castle Cranshaw goes by Ghost. He's fast, he's funny, he talks straight to you, and he gets into more fights than he means to. A few years back his father came home drunk and fired a gun at him and his mother, and the two of them ran out of the house for their lives; that night still lives in him. One afternoon Ghost jumps into a race at a track practice just to prove a point, and the coach clocks his speed and puts him on an elite team. Now he has something he could lose, people who might be his, and a coach who looks past the trouble to the runner. But staying on the team means dealing with what he's been outrunning: the money his family doesn't have, the shoes he can't afford, the temper he can't always hold. Ghost tells the whole thing himself, quick and funny and with his heart right out in the open.
Reynolds writes the way a reluctant reader actually thinks, in short chapters that keep moving, so this reaches children who say they hate books. Ghost narrates it himself, funny and boasting and raw, and that voice carries the harder parts of his life without ever turning into a lecture. A child who loves sports gets a real track story; the rest get a boy working out that the way out of trouble runs through himself. It's the first of four, one book per teammate, so there are three more waiting.