I spent Saturday teaching an all-day workshop on writing YA fiction. Fun, but exhausting. At some point during that day we were talking about S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, a book which continues to echo in so much contemporary YA fiction. A couple of years ago Hinton published a collection of stories for adults and was interviewed at that time by Vanity Fair. In the interview she uses the term "first-person narrative once removed," which I suspect means a peripheral narrator. She also talks about the importance of endings; like our Mary Logue, Hinton savors that final image. I think I'll rustle up a copy of the story collection, Some of Tim's Stories, and acquaint myself with that once-removed first person.
Whatever S.E. Hinton does, she is still a big hit. My (now 8th grade) daughter had to read her book last year for Language Arts and devoured it, being dyslexic this was an amazing feat. I had to pick it back up and read it again, trying to figure out why? After all, it is not contemporary. Yet, I read through it without pause. Still trying piece through the whys of it. I would be curious to see her new story collection to see if it has the same appeal.
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