S. E. Hinton

This was a heavy read. Not because it wasn’t well-written. It was. Emotionally sensitive and attuned, too. The plot was a prime example of cohesiveness.

It was just more depressing and violent than I expected it to be. During some bullying taken too far, one teen gets killed by another teen because he genuinely (and rightly) fears for his own friend’s life. Part of the culture that Ponyboy and his brothers have grown up in is entrenched in fighting — fists, feet, knives, bicycle chains, show more guns, anything that’s handy. A church goes up in flames, and a teen later dies because he goes in to rescue some children trapped inside. Unable to handle his friend’s death, another boy chooses suicide by cop in front of his friends. A few of the teens have some serious records, and robbing a store and smoking a cigar is commonplace. So are neglectful parents and getting kicked out of the house for the night.

One thing you don’t get much of a sense of is a victim mentality. The rough surroundings feel genuine, as if you were born there too, and Ponyboy is a superb narrator who helps us get to a place of understanding his culture. But boy, is it raw.

I appreciated how the author masterfully portrayed the complexity of human relationships and emotions through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy. He gave credence to a boy’s experience of life. It’s an interesting conclusion that it all comes to, the meaning of life. Ponyboy’s life is devoid of God, without whom life has no meaning, so I wouldn’t say it’s a valid conclusion.

I probably wouldn’t want my kids reading it until they were in high school. I see why it’s a classic. But it’s a heavy one. show less

Mistakes were made, OK. I had never read the book, saw the movie yes, but never read (or listened to it) before now. Why now? My son had to read it for school and I thought, damn, I remember that movie (kinda) and if he has to read this modern classic, I should too. Give us something to talk about.
Well I forgot most of what happened and am thoroughly disappointed in myself for having waited so long to get through S.E. Hinton's work of art.
Friends and family, what are they? who are they? show more Adolescence. School. Loss. Life...such big questions, so much to get through. Who can you turn to? Who can you trust? What does it all mean? All of these were on the table for Hinton's 1967 work "The Outsiders". This title made me think, reflect, and remember. Well written, heck more than well written, S.E. Hinton is a woman who wrote a coming-of-age book about boys and young men and never missed a beat. What a feat! The stresses of youth, the life on the wrong side of the tracks, life on the run, but from who or what. And the story of family who they are, finding them, losing them and finally discovering something unlooked for.
What a book, and I might add, extremely well read by Spike McClure. I cannot recommend this more highly than I do. Everyone should read this and experience it. I am absolutely kicking myself for making the mistake of putting off for this long. show less

I actually never read The Outsiders before I taught it in my young adult literature class; I somehow missed this classic of young adult literature. And when I say classic, I mean it: The Outsiders is widely considered by critics to have created a genre. The teenager had really only just been invented after World War II by marketers and advertisers who needed to name this demographic so that they could target it. Thomas Hines, in The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, argues that what show more defines teenagers is their awareness of the world connected to their powerlessness: "[teens] are exposed to all the violence and economic insecurity of the society at large, but, unlike their predecessors, they have few avenues for bearing real responsibility to improve their situation." Previously, this had not been the case: when you discovered society's insecurity it was because you were an adult and thus you were able to do something about it.

Hinton, so the story goes, noticed that there were no books that addressed the world the way she experienced it as a teenager-- and so she wrote one, the book she wanted and needed. Fascinatingly, this is as true within the text as it is outside of it; within The Outsiders, the novel itself is Ponyboy's homework for English class, written for "boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you did. It was too vast a problem to be just a personal thing. There should be some help, someone should tell them before it was too late. Someone should tell their side of the story, and maybe people would understand them and wouldn't be son quick to judge a boy by the amount of hair oil he wore" (179). The book is for teenagers in a way that previous books were not, designed to help them through the problems of their lives that were uniquely teenage, and speaking to them through a distinctly teenage voice, from a distinctly teenage perspective. This is a world of sex and violence, where advice from adults is either nonexistent or completely useless. (The adults, after all, were never teenagers themselves, as teenagers hadn't been invented yet.) And the book has to signal that is by-a-teen-for-a-teen within the text of the novel because that hadn't been done before.

Young adult literature is a tricky genre to define, which is why it fascinates me. Is there any other genre defined so much by audience and marketing? What unites The Outsiders with Twilight other than the age of its protagonist? Yet age is insufficient, because you can have a novel about a young adult that is still not young adult literature. In considering what teenagerhood (teenagerdom? teenagerness? teenagerity?) is like, I think, we begin to discover an answer. Young adult fiction is preoccupied with the questions of teenagers.

I have a friend who criticizes people who identify with The Outsiders: most teenagers, he says, do not have friends who get killed in fights, experience social divisions that lead to murder. And I guess this is true. But The Outsiders captures what being a teenager feels like, that violence that you are so sure is simmering underneath everything. And maybe, most importantly, the uselessness of adults. The Outsiders literalizes this by making Ponyboy and his brother orphans, and having Ponyboy's older brother Darry act as a parent. You have no one who can give you the guidance you need and/or the people who give you advice actually don't know much more than you do. It's a teenager utopian dream, I think, to imagine a world without adults, but The Outsiders depicts that as a dystopia, a horrible hellscape where teenagers prey on each other without oversight. Because, if you're a teenager, that's what teenagerhood feels like, even if an adult (like my friend) would know better. The Outsiders doesn't know better (though Ponyboy begins to have glimpses that this isn't true as the book goes on, so this might just be a pose on the novel's part), and that's what makes it young adult literature. show less

When my daughter discovered this book, I realized I hadn't read it since I was her age. Now I'm able to be properly impressed by S.E. Hinton's own young age when she wrote it. It would have been a contributing factor to her strong capturing of Ponyboy's narrative voice, and her insights into how young boys and girls interact. Her degree of empathy is still astonishing for that age, suggesting a full awareness of how some boys will grow up and others never will; some can be saved from their show more bad ends and some can not, largely depending on whether they can do it themselves. On whether they can learn to control their feelings, or to find them.

It's an unvarnished view into the hardships of being a teenage societal outsider, uncertain where the future will take you or even what kind of future you could possibly have. It is like the movie Grease with all the fantasy stripped away - the dancing, the singing, the souped-up cars. Just poverty on the wrong side of the tracks, and the need to be tough. Not to be cool, but to survive.

I had a good talk with my daughter afterwards. She'd missed realizing Sandy was pregnant and had to be got out of sight, it was subtly done. So is the weaving in of the poem, and the reference to staying gold. Johnny saved his friend Ponyboy more than once, including from beyond the grave. show less