The Boy in the Black Suit by Jason Reynolds

Susan brought this title into library and I pounced. I even retro-added it to the August list so I could dive right in. It took me about two days to plow through it. Jason Reynolds is a good writer. I first became aware of him at a NCTE conference where I saw him talk about his book All American Boys. He's a tall man and soft spoken. When he talked, it was clear how much he cared about the story. I was impressed.

The Boy In the Black Suit is about grief primarily. Matt's mother has died and his dad is in the process of climbing into a bottle. Matt's a mess. He's trying to finish school and he needs to find a job for his co-op. So he goes to the local fast food restaurant to apply. Only he ends up taking a job with the local funeral director, Mr Ray, instead.

Working with Mr. Ray, Matt has the opportunity to observe how others grieve and so he begins to heal.

I've read books about grief before or at least where the major theme was a grieving character. It's surprising to read a book like this that is so overwhelmingly upbeat. There is a love story wrapped up in it all, but that's not what makes it upbeat. It's the characters. Each has experienced loss. Each is at a different stage of the grieving process, and it's like they help each other along.

This isn't the kind of book I would ever reread, but it was an excellent book and I would recommend it to my students.

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

I actually finished my read of this a couple days ago, but I couldn't quite get my thoughts together on it. Some books read like a punch to the gut and when you finish you are helpless to get a breath. I've been a fan of Reynolds for a full year. I first read his book American Boys which is about the beating of a black boy by a police officer and witnessed by a white kid who had connections to both the black boy and the police officer. What impressed me at the time was that the book was set up in alternating chapters from the points of view of the two young men. I felt that the feelings and conflicting issues were handled with equal sensitivity. As a result it felt like a fair-minded examination of the issues at hand. That's not an easy thing to manage.

Long Way Down takes on similarly difficult material. In this case, Reynolds tells the story of Will, a young man who's older brother just got gunned down in a part of a cycle of gang retribution. Will wakes up in the morning and decides to take his brother's gun and shoot the boy he's sure killed his brother, Shawn. He gets into the elevator on the seventh floor and it takes an unusual amount of time to make it down to the lobby. At every floor, the car stops and a different person affected by gang violence steps on to talk to Will about his decision.

This is a book about gang violence. Yes. Really though, it's about the cycle of retribution. How violence begets violence and revenge is a self perpetuating goal. It's about gangs but it's really just about the nature of revenge.

Long Way Down is a novel in verse told in the close perspective of Will. His reactions and feelings are raw and well expressed. This book gave me chills and despite the subject matter, I would hand it to virtually any of the boys I teach (with varying amounts of preparation). I continue to be a fan of Reynolds.

Sunny by Jason Reynolds

Part three in the four part Track Series by Jason Reynolds, Sunny  just came out at the beginning of April. That makes this unusually fresh read for me. I generally wait with great patience for prices to come down, but this one was a media center purchase and I swiped it. In my defense I waited a whole three weeks.

Each of the four books follows a different character and is named for that character. These four kids are the new members of the community track team. I have to admit, of the four characters I was least looking forward to Sunny. I mean Ghost starts it all off and he's an amazingly compelling and sympathetic character. Patina comes next and she's super sassy coupled with an interesting home situation. But Sunny.

Sunny is just weird. He's this super smiley kid who seems to react weirdly to the events in the other two books. There's just something off about him.

To give Reynolds credit, he really works with that for this book. Sunny is written as a series of diary entries but I swear the kid is suffering from synesthesia. He interprets everything as sound, but it does enliven the diary entries.

Sunny also has an interesting back story. His mom died giving birth to him and he lives in a giant house with his father, Darryl. He's also home schooled. (I'm not inherently opposed to the idea of homeschooling but I have to admit that as it is described here I have to wonder what the kid is actually learning.) All of this accounts some for his weird affect.

This is a good quick read. The diary entries are short providing a lot of breaks and the subject matter is relatable.I'll be interested in how Reynolds closes out the series.

Patina by Jason Reynolds

So, these middle reader series are just too easy to eat up. This is book two in the Track series and follows Patina who is the only girl of the four newbies to join the Defenders track team.

Patina, goes by Patty, has one of the more unusual family situations. She and her younger sister, Maddy, have been adopted by a white woman and her husband. Patty and Maddy are black, so there is some background friction about that which shows up initially in the first book Ghost. The friction isn't because her adopted mom is white, it's because Patty seems to feel like she needs to defend it. Her bio mom isn't out of the picture.

Her mother, Beverly Jones, is still alive and still involved in Patty's life but because she's a diabetic double amputee, she can't take care of herself and two little girls. That's where the adopted family comes in. They are actually Patty and Maddy's uncle and aunt who adopted them when things started to get out of hand. Like I said, unusual in fiction, but probably pretty common in real life.

So, while this is still about the running, this volume comes out a little more like a family drama. Patty's got a lot of choked down rage and anger. She's going to a predominantly white prep school and she's got a lot of static in her head about it. Strangely, while Patty feels out of place at the school, it doesn't seem like it's really a race issue. It feels more like a socioeconomic division which while it does often break along race lines, skin color doesn't really seem to be at the core of the alienation.

Clearly, there are more race themes in this book. While Ghost is definitely black, in his book it was really more about being in poverty than any kind of class friction. Patina is definitely struggling with some internalized friction.

I think Ghost was a more compelling character, but Patina is a good book too. I guess I just get tired of girl drama and there's no way to write this without girl drama.

Ghost by Jason Reynolds

I actually met Jason Reynolds at a NCTE conference about a year and a half ago. I had one of those weird experiences for a reader where listening to the author made me believe that I would love his book...and I did. I passed it around all my friends and they loved it too. One of them loved it so much, in fact, that they walked off with it and we had to replace it. Jason Reynolds is officially on my watch list, so I was very excited to see a series coming out from him.

The Track series, of which Ghost is the first, is about four friends of about middle school/high school age who are members of a track team. Four books are scheduled and each book follows a different one of the four.

Ghost kicks it off with Castle Crenshaw, known to himself as Ghost. Ghost is a poster child for tragic and damaged. His father is in jail for shooting a gun at he and his mom. So now his mom works hard in a hospital cafeteria during the day and studies to be a nurse at night. She works hard for him and Ghost knows it.

However, knowing something like that doesn't mean that it's easy or even possible to be the perfect kid. In fact, that's almost a recipe for a lot of internal turmoil and conflict. Ghost struggles and he has a temper. He gets in trouble at school a lot mainly because he hates a bully and he hates a showboat. This intolerance for a showboat sparks him into racing a hot shot sprinter on the team and one thing leads to another.

Ghost is good. Like really good. I gulped down the whole thing in about three and a half hours. It is a short book but the conversational tone of the writing and the pacing really gripped me hard. I was just watching this kid, who could easily be a kid that I teach, making all of these totally obvious mistakes and instead of getting annoyed with him, I really worried for him. Reynolds did a great job of capturing Ghost's voice.