The Outsiders by SE Hinton

The Outsiders by SE Hinton is a classic in young adult literature. I'm not sure how I got through school without reading it, but I read about ten pages and immediately filed it under what I would call a "boy book." Like A Separate Peace, The Catcher in the Rye, and most Gary Paulsen books, these are books that feature male characters and it's as if women don't exist at all. As a young reader, I found these books to be almost unreadable and would avoid them if at all possible.

And I really kept putting off this one, too.  I read the first ten pages and put the book down for a day. Read another ten pages and put it down for another day. Rinse and repeat. It took me more than a week to read this relatively slim volume because I just didn't want to read it.

It tells the story of a group of thugs young men who are referred to and call themselves greasers and their rivalry with another group of thugs young men.  The youngest greaser is our main character whose name (on his birth certificate was we read over and over and over again) is Ponyboy.  We follow Ponyboy as things, already bad with his parents recently dying and his oldest brother desperately trying to keep the three brothers together, get worse and worse.

It's a book for a certain reader.  That reader is not me.

I was never a kid who settled issues with violence. I was never a kid who got in "with a bad crowd." I was an outsider, sure, but not an outsider like these kids.  And while I understand that the lives of the greasers are hard, I also thought that they didn't make things any easier for themselves. And the whole teenage boy angst thing just got really old quickly for me. And I think it would have gotten old for me when I was a teenager (don't even get me started on Holden Caulfield). I know that what I'm writing is probably sacrilegious and upsetting to some, but The Outsiders is not going to the top of my books to be recommended to teenage boys list.