When Watching the Movie Version is Totally Worth It

The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton

One of the most surprising things about this book is not that it was written by a woman, but that she was a teenager at the time she wrote it. It has such amazing insight into the lives of two groups (not quite gangs) of boys from opposite sides of the tracks. The Socs (short for Socials, and pronounced similarly) from the richer part of town and the Greasers from the poorer side. The bulk of the story takes place after an unfortunate sequence of events leaves one Soc dead and two Greasers on the run from police. Ultimately, members from each group break from the bounds of their class by performing acts of personal courage, and their reasons for doing so form the moral basis of the book.

After reading this book, my book club watched the original 80’s movie, which was chock-full of the heart-throbs of the day; Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez. The movie made we want to rewatch Breakfast Club, Ghost and St. Elmo’s Fire again. Ah, the 80’s. Good times!

Not much else to say about this book other than if you’ve never read it you should do so right now. Due to alleged “controversial themes” of gang violence and underage drinking/smoking, the book has been banned in some places, which is all the more reason to read it. I am intensely opposed to the banning of books. My home town was Peterborough, Ontario, and a short distance a way was a town called Lakefield where Margaret Laurence lived for many years. One of my towns greatest shames, IMO, was when a group of parents (some of whom were friends of my parents) tried to get The Diviners banned in the high school libraries for being “obscene” and “blasphemous”. (Blasphemous!!!??? WTF?? Blasphemous shouldn’t even be a thing.) Some of these parents hadn’t even read the book, as is often the case with book-banning vigilantes. And the author lived just down the road! We should have been celebrating her proximity to us, not embarrassing ourselves. I was glad to leave that town…

Rating: Buy it. You should have this one in your permanent collection, next to The Diviners and Catcher in the Rye.