Occasionally, they meet up with M&M, a younger kid from their neighbourhood. They hustle pool, chase ‘chicks’ and generally get up to no good. The two boys live a relatively hard-scrabble life with Bryon’s single mother mom. We had never even had an argument…He was my best friend and we were like brothers. He had lived down the street and it seemed to me that we had always been together. I had been friends with Mark long before he came to live with us. It concerns the fates of Bryon, the novel’s sixteen-year-old narrator and his boyhood best friend and de facto brother, Mark. That Was The, This is Now treads familiar ground (and in fact Ponyboy even makes an appearance in this book). Plus, it gave me an excuse to read it 40 odd years later after my first go-around. So, when it came time to choose the novel I wanted to begin my first ever Young Adult Literature class with, I chose Hinton’s second book – mostly because I knew that although many students would be familiar with The Outsiders, they might not know this book. Then I read Hinton’s second novel, That Was Then, This is Now and I remember that it had a profound impact on me. It’s considered the seminal young adult novel and remains a classroom favourite almost 50 years after its publication. Written when Hinton was just sixteen and published around the time she graduated from high school, The Outsiders tells the story of the Curtis brothers Darry, Soda, and Ponyboy. Back in the day, there probably wasn’t a teenager alive who hadn’t read The Outsiders, S.E.
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