Ghost Study Guide

Jason Reynolds grew up in Maryland with his three siblings. The son of a special education teacher, Reynolds came to literature in a roundabout manner.  As a young boy, he loved rap music and began writing poetry inspired by the artists he enjoyed, such as Tupac, Queen Latifah, and Biggie Smalls. Reynolds did not regularly read books until his late teenage years, nor did he perform well in his English classes. Reynolds studied English at the University of Maryland and, though he graduated with a BA, he struggled there as well. In college, Reynolds met Jason Griffin, who would become one of his frequent collaborators. After college, Reynolds and Griffin published a series of works that combined Reynolds’s poetry with Griffin’s visual art. However, Reynolds would not become a well-known writer until the release of his novel When I Was the Greatest in 2015. Reynolds followed When I Was the Greatest with his best-known work, Ghost, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2016. Since Ghost, Reynolds has published many children’s and young adult novels and won many awards for his work, including the Coretta Scott King Award. Additionally, Reynolds wrote a series of Marvel Comics titled Miles Morales: Spider-Man in 2017 and collaborated with activist Ibram X. Kendi on Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You in 2020. Today, Reynolds remains a prolific writer, generally publishing at least one new book per year.

Ghost is set in the contemporary United States in an unnamed urban area. There are not details in the novel that would suggest the setting is modeled after a particular American city. However, it does contain many cultural references that mark it in time. For instance, Ghost and Coach Brody debate whether Lebron James or Michael Jordan is the better basketball player, a question that was popular in sports media in 2016 at the time of the novel’s release. In the same conversation, Coach Brody references Usain Bolt, who was considered the greatest sprinter in the world at the time of the novel’s release—a title which, as of 2024, he still holds. The novel also addresses how poverty disproportionately affects minority communities in the United States, particularly Black Americans like Ghost and his neighbors. Meanwhile, Sunny, the most prominent white character in the novel, lives on the other, richer side of town among mostly other white people.

Ghost is the first book in Reynolds’ Track series. Each book in the series focuses on a different member of Ghost’s track team, and the installments share their name with that character. The other books in the Track series include Patina (2017), Sunny (2018) and Lu (2018). A throughline of much of Reynolds’ work is how identity (particularly race and social class) intersects with other aspects of life. This theme is present in all of the Track novels as well as in All American Boys (2015) and As Brave as You (2016). Ghost is also part a fairly popular subgenre of youth novels that focus on sports and identity. Other examples include Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover (2014), Joshua C. Cohen’s Leverage (2012), and Sara Biren’s Cold Day in the Sun (2019).