The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

 The Outsiders

by S.E. Hinton

One of my favorite book tropes is the adolescent or pre-adolescent boy with psychological or social trauma and self-discovery. Some of my favorite books involve this theme: Catcher in the Rye, I Know This Much is True, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, to name a few. The Outsiders is another book that carries this theme, following Ponyboy Curtis and a gang of greasers in the mid-20th century.

Ponyboy and his two brothers navigate a world of delinquency and violence, though the three of them are smart and savvy in there own ways. The greasers and the socs have turf wars and throughout the story Ponyboy discovers that even though the two groups are very different, they are both beset by there own problems, both societal and psychological, and that they can be taken down by the prejudices of their respective social groups.

After a tragic incident involving Ponyboy, his friend Johnny, and two socs, Ponyboy and Johnny go on the run to escape a murder charge for Johnny, and the possibility of being split up from his brothers and put in a boys' home for Ponyboy, whose parents are dead. After an accident that makes both boys into heroes Johnny dies from injuries sustained during the event and Ponyboy learns that fighting, and the lifestyle he has been living, will only lead him in an endless cycle of violence and delinquency, like the others in the greasers group. He knows that he and his brothers don't need to go down that path, that they all could have a way out of it, but that their biggest enemy is society and how it views them based on their looks and lack of privilege.

The story was written by SE Hinton when she was 15 and 16 years old, and reads as a young adult novel. It is an inside look at youth life during that era and setting. Though it doesn't flinch away from violence and psychological abuse, it does leave a little to be desired as far as the writing is concerned. I felt that the sentence structures could have been a little more sophisticated, given that the narrator was supposed to be smart and well-read. I did really enjoy that the story was bookended by the same paragraph, and could be read in a circle. Interesting structural idea.

Overall I give The Outsiders 4 stars, based on the context of young adult writing for the time it was written and published. Stay gold, Ponyboy.