The Running Dream

Wendelin Van Draanen was born on January 6, 1965 in Chicago, Illinois to Dutch immigrant parents. She is one of four siblings. Early in her childhood, the family moved to California, where Van Draanen now lives with her own family. She received an undergraduate degree in ergonomics and a graduate degree in teaching. After graduate school, she taught high-school math and computer science for 15 years. Her first novel, the children’s book How I Survived Being a Girl, was published in 1997. Since then, she has gone on to author three children’s book series—the Sammy Keyes series (1998-2014), the Shredderman series (2004-2006) and the Gecko & Sticky series (2009-2010)—as well as nine standalone novels for children or young adults. Her standalone novels include Flipped (2001), a young-adult romance that was made into a film in 2010, and The Running Dream (2011), which won a Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children’s Book Award, among other awards. Van Draanen is married to Mark Huntley Parsons, a fellow author of young-adult books. They have two sons. 

In The Running Dream (2011), the track coach of protagonist Jessica, a track star who has undergone a below-the-knee amputation, shows her videos of South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius as an example of an amputee who competes in track events for nondisabled people. Two years after the publication of The Running Dream, Pistorius was convicted of homicide for the killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp; at the time the novel was published, however, he was famous for breaking Paralympic records in the 200 meter and 400 meter races, as well as for winning silver medals in a number of non-disabled sports events and for competing in the 400 meter in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Initially, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) judged Pistorius ineligible to compete in non-disabled running events due to his use of running blades, the kind of running prosthesis that Jessica uses in The Running Dream; however, the IAAF reversed its ruling and ruled Pistorius eligible to compete in non-disabled events, the decision that ultimately allowed him to compete in the Olympics as well as the Paralympics.

The Running Dream is a contemporary young-adult novel about teenage athlete Jessica learning to deal with her below-the-knee amputation while befriending a classmate, Rosa, who has cerebral palsy. Other contemporary young-adult novels featuring characters with physical disabilities include Padma Venkatraman’s A Time to Dance (2014), about a teenager danger with a below-the-knee amputation, and Leah Thomas’s Wild and Crooked (2019), one of whose two protagonists has cerebral palsy. The Running Dream also relates Jessica’s experiences of ostracism and bullying due to her disability; other books by Wendelin Van Draanen about bullying are her children’s series Shredderman (2004 –2006), about a fifth grader struggling with a bully. Finally, Wendelin Van Draanen has mentioned other authors as influences on her own writing: these authors include Ray Bradbury, who is known as a writer of adult science fiction but whose novels Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) feature adolescent protagonists, and Donald J. Sobol, who wrote the Encyclopedia Brown (1963-2012) mystery series for children.