The Outsiders
S.E. Hinton • 1967
Devastation Rating
class youth violence friendship
Our Take
Hinton was sixteen when she wrote it, which explains why the grief feels that raw and unmediated. Johnny and Dally do not get noble deaths — they get sudden, meaningless ones, the kind that happen to poor kids in rumbles on the wrong side of town. Stay gold is advice the book itself refuses to follow.
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