The speed of Wendelin Van Draanen's prose is extremely quick, and mirrors the speed around the track of her protagonist, sixteen year old Jessica Carlisle, a high school track star who loses a leg when her track team's bus collides with a car driven by an uninsured driver. The book follows Jessica's journey; fundraisers to buy her a prosthetic leg, new friendships, and finally, the recalibration of her running dream that ultimately she realizes she is still able to pursue.
The novel deals with many themes, including the unfairness and randomness of life, bad things happening to good people, the way in which people with disabilities are viewed by others, and the nature of friendship. In many ways it is a coming of age story, as it shows the enforced maturation of a protagonist totally unprepared for the hand that she has been very unfairly dealt.
Van Draanen is an award winning author, penning fiction for young adults, an is most well-known for her eighteen-novel series of Sammy Keyes books which first appeared in 1998. Sammy Keye's crime solving adventures won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Juvenile Mystery Series, and was followed up with a series about a fifth grade boy who takes on a secret identity so that he can fight for truth and justice without getting caught.
Although it is one of Van Draanen's few books that are outside the mystery genre, The Running Dream was also highly critically acclaimed, and was awarded a place on the Lone Star Book List in 2011.
