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A review by richardrbecker
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
5.0
Written before there ever was a young adult genre, S.E. Hinton's coming-of-age story (one she mostly wrote in high school) stands the test of time. It does so, largely, because Hinton has always had a gift for breathing life into characters — people you either identify with or can quickly identify on the street.
The story captures the caste system that has always existed in high schools, and this time as it existed in Oklahoma during the 1960s. There are Socs, and there are Greasers. And when two Soc girls blow off their boyfriends at a drive-in movie theater and have a chance run-in with two younger Greasers, things become complicated and eventually escalate.
The protagonist of the story is one of these younger boys, Ponyboy Curtis. He's a fourteen-year-old narrator and the youngest member of an unofficial gang. Despite being a Greaser, he is especially bright, academically smart, and interested in literature. He might not even be a Greaser had his parents not died in a car accident.
Now he lives with his two brothers Darrel "Darry" and Sodapop. Darry is the defacto guardian, doing his best to hold the household together by working two jobs. When he was in school, nobody considered him a Greaser. He was a star football player with ambitions to go to college.
The other bother, Soda Pop, is a happy-go-lucky hard worker who dropped out of school to get a job. He is suffering some inner turmoil that goes unnoticed until the end of the novel, primarily because the plot is driven mainly by the Socs inserting themselves into the lives of Ponyboy and his friend Johnny Cade, the sixteen-year-old kid who helped walk two girls home.
The novel does a fantastic job sparring with familiar and timeless themes, including class division, violence, innocence, loss, and familial love. By struggling through these uninvited issues, Ponyboy undergoes a transformation in how he understands the world, his place within it, and what can be done about it. It was a riveting story, one I was thrilled to revisit recently with my daughter.
The story captures the caste system that has always existed in high schools, and this time as it existed in Oklahoma during the 1960s. There are Socs, and there are Greasers. And when two Soc girls blow off their boyfriends at a drive-in movie theater and have a chance run-in with two younger Greasers, things become complicated and eventually escalate.
The protagonist of the story is one of these younger boys, Ponyboy Curtis. He's a fourteen-year-old narrator and the youngest member of an unofficial gang. Despite being a Greaser, he is especially bright, academically smart, and interested in literature. He might not even be a Greaser had his parents not died in a car accident.
Now he lives with his two brothers Darrel "Darry" and Sodapop. Darry is the defacto guardian, doing his best to hold the household together by working two jobs. When he was in school, nobody considered him a Greaser. He was a star football player with ambitions to go to college.
The other bother, Soda Pop, is a happy-go-lucky hard worker who dropped out of school to get a job. He is suffering some inner turmoil that goes unnoticed until the end of the novel, primarily because the plot is driven mainly by the Socs inserting themselves into the lives of Ponyboy and his friend Johnny Cade, the sixteen-year-old kid who helped walk two girls home.
The novel does a fantastic job sparring with familiar and timeless themes, including class division, violence, innocence, loss, and familial love. By struggling through these uninvited issues, Ponyboy undergoes a transformation in how he understands the world, his place within it, and what can be done about it. It was a riveting story, one I was thrilled to revisit recently with my daughter.