44 pages • 1 hour read
Jason ReynoldsSunny
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Friday”
Protagonist Sunny Lancaster writes a series of diary entries over the course of a week in his life. In his first entry, he writes that it’s been “a while” (1) since his last entry. He deflects from explaining what has happened to him since then, instead focusing on why he uses the word “diary” instead of “journal” and why he likes drinking milk even though it bothers his stomach. He ends the entry with an explanation: “Because I’m weird” (2).
Sunny starts another entry and explains that he is writing again after a hiatus because he feels his anxiety increasing. Sunny recalls that his father, whom he calls “Darryl,” gave him the diary when he was younger as a way to calm his mind and make him more “hushy hushy” (3). Sunny explains that writing takes the “hunger-growl out of my mind” (4) and that he can feel that hunger-growl growing louder. He also explains that writing prevents Sunny from having to talk to his dad about his feelings, because Darryl “doesn’t want to be disturbed” (4).
Sunny also writes that his private teacher, Aurelia, thinks it is a good thing that Sunny takes up writing again because she knows Sunny is scared about a decision he must make. According to Sunny, “scared sounds like glass shattering” (5). Sunny runs on an elite track team called The Defenders, but Sunny no longer wants to run. He must tell his coach the next day at his weekly track meet and the thought scares him. He closes the entry by asking his diary whether it resents him for writing in it, and whether the diary wants to stay blank or “whatever you think you are?” (6). Sunny says he knows what that feels like.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Saturday”
Sunny opens a new diary entry by thinking about sound, and how everything has a sound “connected to it. Has a tick or a boom” (7). Switching courses, he recalls three weeks prior when he was watching his friend and fellow Defenders runner, Patina, win her first 4x800 relay. He describes how excited the team was at Patina’s win and reveals that he is also a frequent winner.
In fact, Sunny rarely loses a race, and week after week he brings home his blue ribbons to give to Darryl. Despite his obvious skill and prowess, Sunny feels “whatever” (8) about running in large part due to Darryl’s post-race lecture. Sunny writes about what his father says to him: His mother would want him to work harder and remember to breathe, which Sunny finds difficult.
Darryl’s speech always reminds Sunny of his birth, which coincided with his mother’s death from an amniotic embolism. Sunny explains that he didn’t cry when he was first born because he wasn’t breathing: “And my mother was crying. Then I started breathing. Then she stopped. And I started crying” (9). Sunny writes that he sometimes feels like “a murderer” (11) for what happened to his mother. Unsure of how to cope with the pain of his loss, Darryl has told Sunny since childhood that he needs to carry out his mother’s dream of becoming a marathon winner, something Sunny has never wanted for himself.
This brings Sunny back to the race earlier that day. During his race, way ahead of the other runners and heading for a win, Sunny suddenly stops running and slows to a walk. Everyone in the crowd starts yelling, wondering what is going on, and Sunny hears his coach, Coach, yelling at him and sees Darryl stand up in the stands. Sunny sees his face which looks like “a stone becoming more of a stone” (14) expressing his astonishment and disappointment at Sunny’s choice.
In a new entry, Sunny explains that the ride home from the meet was silent. Sunny stops himself from asking Darryl if he wants to know why Sunny stopped running “a week before my thirteenth birthday, her deathday” (17). He resolves to talk to Aurelia about it on Monday when she arrives for school.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Sunday”
In a short entry, Sunny writes that “Diary-ing’s not for Sundays” (18) because he thinks his diary deserves a day off from all of Sunny’s thoughts. Sunny ends the entry by saying that he too wishes he could sometimes turn off his own thoughts and be “as blank and closed” as his diary.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
These opening chapters introduce protagonist Sunny Lancaster, who reintroduces himself to his diary after not writing for some time. Sunny is a deep thinker whose train of thought often goes faster than he can express:
boing boing in my brain
like a jumping bean
my brain a moon bounce at a party
nobody’s invited to (4).
The idea of making sense concerns Sunny at first, but then he remembers the words of his teacher, Aurelia, and writes, “So none of this has to make sense, it just has to make… me, me” (5). This introduces an important theme in the text as Sunny tries to figure out who he is and who he wants to become. Sunny’s way of thinking comes into focus for readers when Sunny reveals the traumas that he uses writing to process.
Many of Sunny’s feelings stem from the death of his mother from an amniotic embolism which coincided with Sunny’s birth. Sunny describes he and his mother as “ships in the night” (9), using the simile to emphasize how his mother’s death has shaped the course of his life, relationships, and identity. Sunny carries an enormous amount of guilt and shame due to his mother’s death. He believes that “something is wrong with me, Diary, which made something wrong with her” (9-10). He goes as far as to ask his diary whether “you know what it feels like to feel like a murderer? I do [...] I still do. Sometimes” (11). These beliefs that something is wrong with him and that he somehow caused his mother's death are a kind of survivor’s guilt that places an enormous amount of stress on Sunny.
Sunny tries to manage his anxiety through writing. He writes in an entry that in the past, his diary helped him to “take the hunger-growl out of my mind” (4) and that now he feels that “the volume on the growl is turning up again” (4). This is the result of Sunny’s desire to quit his track team even though he is successful, which conflicts with his father’s expectations that Sunny run in honor of his mother.
Sunny’s mother’s death has greatly affected Sunny’s relationship with his father, Darryl. The relationship is strained, which is clear in the way Sunny only calls his father by his first name and writes in his journal partly because he does not want to interrupt or bother Darryl with his feelings. Darryl struggles to process his own immeasurable loss, and as a result puts pressure on Sunny to live up to his mother’s legacy as an accomplished runner. At Sunny’s track meets, he can hear Darryl in the stands yelling at Sunny saying things like “Your mother would want you to breathe. What’s wrong with you?” (9). Sunny sets in motion important developments in his identity and relationships when he stops running in the middle of his mile event: “Just pulled up, stopped running, started walking” (13). This decision symbolizes Sunny’s choice to take control of his identity and who he wants to become. In defiance of his father’s wishes, Sunny’s choice will force them to confront all that goes unspoken between them.
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