Best Seller Books: The Outsiders Review

I first read _The Outsiders_ 19 years ago (the year that the film version was released). Hinton was all the rage to read in my high school and I was seriously attached to Ponyboy and Sodapop and the rest. Like many another teenage girl smitten by Ralph Macchio, I memorized the Robert Frost poem and cried buckets at the end of the book.
It's funny to me to hear recent reviewers discussing the book in terms of its relationship to gangs, because I don't see it as being about rival factions. Instead, I see it more as a meditation on the price of having an inside and an outside to any given social context. At the time the book was written, it was the socs and the greasers. At my high school it was the Jocks and the Beegs. It's about people being judged by their clothes and their family rather than their abilities and their desires.
Hinton's book stands up well to time-- I'm a lot more cynical than I was as a child and I couldn't summon tears anymore for the characters, but reading it I could still revisit the concerns that I had at the time and the world that this book represented.
A good gift for young teenagers.

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