Sunny

Jason Reynolds's Sunny is a funny, big-hearted diary of a book for 11 year olds about a boy who stops dead partway through a race and decides he'd rather dance.

What happens

Sunny is the star miler on the Defenders track team. He wins every single week, and he's bored stiff. To him the mile is just the chick chick chick of his feet going round and round while nobody watches until the last lap.

So one Saturday, way out in front on the final lap, he just stops. He walks. He smiles and claps as the other runners charge past him, while his dad stands up in the stands with a face like stone.

It isn't really about running. Sunny's mum died on the day he was born, and she was a runner. His dad (Sunny has to call him Darryl) keeps telling him what she would have wanted. Nobody has ever blamed Sunny out loud. He just feels it.

What do you do when you're a runner who doesn't want to run? Coach asks him what he'd rather do instead. Sunny dances for him right there by the track. And Coach, of all people, goes rummaging in the back of his cab and comes out with a discus.

It's all written as Sunny's diary, and he's a very funny, very weird boy (his word, and he's proud of it). He turns everything into sounds and rhymes, wonders why milk is called milk, and gets taught maths by making pancakes with Aurelia, his blue-haired home-school teacher. The sad bits sit right next to the silly ones, just like they do in real life.

This is the third book about the Defenders, and Sunny introduces everyone as he goes.

There's some heavy stuff here for the top of the shelf. Sunny says he feels like a murderer. Aurelia tells him about the years she was hooked on drugs and how his mum helped her get clean. Twice a week they visit the cancer ward where his grandad works, to dance for the patients. None of it is graphic and all of it is told kindly. But if your reader has lost a parent, it's one to read together or at least talk about.

What to read next

If they'd like to meet the team from the start, go back to Jason Reynolds's Ghost, the first of the four Defenders books. Be aware that it opens somewhere darker, with a boy remembering the night his dad fired a gun at him and his mum.