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    Sunny
    Sunny
    Sunny
    Audiobook3 hours

    Sunny

    Written by Jason Reynolds

    Narrated by Guy Lockard

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Sunny tries to shine despite his troubled past in this third novel in the critically acclaimed Track series from National Book Award finalist Jason Reynolds.

    Ghost. Patina. Sunny. Lu. Four kids from wildly different backgrounds, with personalities that are explosive when they clash. But they are also four kids chosen for an elite middle school track team—a team that could take them to the state championships. They all have a lot to lose, but they all have a lot to prove, not only to each other, but to themselves. Sunny is the main character in this novel, the third of four books in Jason Reynold’s electrifying middle grade series.

    Sunny is just that—sunny. Always ready with a goofy smile and something nice to say, Sunny is the chillest dude on the Defenders team. But his life hasn’t always been sun beamy-bright. You see, Sunny is a murderer. Or at least he thinks of himself that way. His mother died giving birth to him, and based on how Sunny’s dad treats him—ignoring him, making Sunny call him Darryl, never “Dad”—it’s no wonder Sunny thinks he’s to blame. It seems the only thing Sunny can do right in his dad’s eyes is win first place ribbons running the mile, just like his mom did. But Sunny doesn’t like running, never has. So he stops. Right in the middle of a race.

    With his relationship with his dad now worse than ever, the last thing Sunny wants to do is leave the other newbies—his only friends—behind. But you can’t be on a track team and not run. So Coach asks Sunny what he wants to do. Sunny’s answer? Dance. Yes, dance. But you also can’t be on a track team and dance. Then, in a stroke of genius only Jason Reynolds can conceive, Sunny discovers a track event that encompasses the hard beats of hip-hop, the precision of ballet, and the showmanship of dance as a whole: the discus throw. But as he practices for this new event, can he let go of everything that’s been eating him up inside?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateApr 10, 2018
    ISBN9781508246145
    Author

    Jason Reynolds

    Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, a two-time National Book Award finalist, a Kirkus Award winner, a UK Carnegie Medal winner, a two-time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, an Odyssey Award Winner and two-time honoree, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors and the Margaret A. Edwards Award. He was also the 2020–2022 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. His many books include All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely); When I Was the Greatest; The Boy in the Black Suit; Stamped; As Brave as You; For Every One; the Track series (Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu); Look Both Ways; Stuntboy, in the Meantime; Ain’t Burned All the Bright (recipient of the Caldecott Honor) and My Name Is Jason. Mine Too. (both cowritten with Jason Griffin); and Long Way Down, which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor. His debut picture book, There Was a Party for Langston, won a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor. He lives in Washington, DC. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.

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    Reviews for Sunny

    4.5/5

    111 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The rhythm of this story is amazing. Stay weird, y’all!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Jason Reynolds is one of my favorite authors....but Guy Lockard brings Sunny to life in his reading! Perfection!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Jason Reynolds writes such engaging stories and Guy Lockard brings the character to life!
    • 5/5
      Love, love, love Sunny; his diary entries, his inner and physical outer voice, his integrity to himself to stop running and dance for folks at the hospital, and dance to throw the discus. I have fallen in love with his team mates and coach in the Track series of books. I could knock Jason upside the head for always stopping the action at competitions so I have to grab the next audiobook to continue listening. Jason’s friend and narrator for Sunny is over the top fabulous, so free, so strong in portraying shifts in emotion. Now I need to move on to the next book to learn where that disc landed. So grateful I have time to listen-one book after another. It’s cool if you want to read these books, but listening to then as audiobooks lets you fully live them along with the characters❣️
    • 3/5
      For as long as Sunny can remember, his dad has been urging him to run, to train harder, to get stronger. Sunny's mother died when Sunny was born, and his dad wants to see Sunny achieve her dream of winning a marathon. And Sunny's good at running, no question. It's just that he kind of hates it. Sunny has other dreams -- but he also has the best friends of his life on the track team, and he doesn't want to quit. Can Coach find a solution?This third book in the series did not work for me. It's in diary format, and it suffers from the same issues that I've seen in other books for this format. For instance, there are several entries detailing the events of a track meet. Are we supposed to believe that Sunny brought his secret diary to the meet and whipped it out to write in every few minutes? And other entries are much more believable in terms of voice -- they're basically stream-of-consciousness -- but I just don't love Sunny's narrative voice the way I expected to. As one might expect by now, the book ends on a mild cliffhanger. All in all, I can see myself recommending this series to kids interested in sports books, but I won't revisit it.
    • 4/5
      Solid book 3 from the track series, this time focusing on Sunny and all the things he does not say to the world. It's a little harder to immediately relate to than the previous 2 books, partly because there's spaces in the diary format that cause things to jump a bit, partly because Sunny's home-schooled life is so different from the other kids' school stories, and finally because Sunny thinks in sound effects a lot, which takes some getting used to. Still, the story is strong, and it's good to know where Sunny is coming from.
    • 5/5
      children's fiction (3rd grade and up as a read-aloud, 4th and up as a read-alone--Sunny's spoken-word poetry style of writing will take a more seasoned reader to make sense of, but the themes he deals with are easy to feel for--deceased mother, withdrawn father, lonely homeschooled kid)

      Book 3 in the "Track" series stands on its own, but you're going to want to read them all anyway and might as well read them in order.

      Sunny is really "weird," as he likes to describe himself, and following his train of thought will amuse you but also endear you. Such a sweet, weird, lovable kid.
    • 3/5
      Each book in the Track series is told in the first person by a different member of the team. Reynolds writes in a somewhat different style for each character, to give them each their own writing voice. That was a big drawback in this book. The story to be told was good, but the voice was irritating to read. Rather than a straightforward first person narrative, the whole book is diary entries, as in "Dear Diary, I don't know if I ever told you..." I've always found the idea of writing Dear Diary, as though the diary were a person, to be highly affected and silly. Add to that the way Sunny often writes in strings of nonsensical sound effects... "Has a tick or a boom. Or something. Like a tickboom. Or a tick-tick boom. Or a tick-bada-bada-boom-bap-bap-oh. Or..." Yes, that was a direct quote from the book. All to say, the book was not an enjoyable read like the "Ghost" and "Patina" were. The story being told was good though. Sunny's mother died the day he was born. He's grown up calling his wealthy father "Darryl," and being tutored instead of going to school. His father has never addressed his own grief from the death of his wife, and as such, has not been a warm parent to his son. Always taken good care of him, but never given him the deep personal love Sonny craves. This is the real subject of the book. The whole track aspect (Sonny has always been a runner but starts throwing the discus in this book) feels like a somewhat irrelevant side story to the tale of the boy and his dad coping with their grief.I've read most of Jason Reynolds' books, and rated all of them before either a 4 or 5 star. This one wasn't up to par with his usual work.
    • 5/5
      Sunny always runs the mile race, but one day he just... stops. In his diary, he explains why: truth is, he doesn't like running. He's only been doing it because Darryl (his father) wants him to, because it's what his mother who died when Sunny was born, would have wanted. Sunny isn't sure he wants to give up the track team, with his friends and sense of belonging, so Coach decides to teach him discus instead.Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu each are new kids on the track team this year, and each get their story in this loose series. I say loose because while they happen in a certain chronology, any of the three books I've read so far could be picked up with no prior knowledge of the others and still be a good read. There may be minor spoilers, but it's so much about each character's development that it really doesn't matter. Sunny's writing in a diary was a surprising change of pace for this one, and if you like audiobooks, the performance by Guy Lockard is phenomenal and really brings the words off the page with all of Sunny's cadences and humor and sound effects.
    • 4/5
      Sunny, the Defenders' best runner, only runs for his father, who blames Sunny for his mother's death, but with his coach's help Sunny finds a way to combine track and field with his true passion, dancing.
    • 3/5
      Sunny is usually the long distance runner for his track team, the Defenders, but he's never run for himself - always for his mom who died during childbirth. One day he decides he's just not going to run anymore, no matter how easy it is to win, he would much rather dance. The only sort of dancing on the track team is the discus, and through his journey learning how to participate in this new way, Sunny writes in his diary and shares all of his thoughts, feelings, and relationship challenges while finding himself. This was weird. Admittedly at the end of the book the author comes on and says that this is the book about the weird kid, but I had a hard time with the train of thought - maybe it was because it was audio (and the reader did a great job making it seem like train of thought - half sing song, half ramble, weird emphasis). I appreciated the look into Sunny after reading the first two books in the series but if it started with this I don't think I would have continued.