Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Hinton, S. E. - Elizabeth Ward (review date 12 February 1989)

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Elizabeth Ward (review date 12 February 1989)

SOURCE: "Young Bookshelf," in The Washington Post Book World, February 12, 1989, p. 9.

[In the following excerpt, Ward offers a negative assessment of Taming the Star Runner, describing the characters as superficial and self-absorbed and asserting that the prose falls flat.]

In [Taming the Star Runner,] her first novel since Tex, published 10 years ago, the phenomenally popular S. E. Hinton returns to the familiar territory of teen-age disaffection and the search for happiness.

Good-looking Travis, with his blackfringed, gray-green eyes, as cold as the Irish sea, is neither a doper nor a straight, but a sensitive, intelligent, creative, profoundly misunderstood cat-lover, who has recently become a juvenile delinquent through no fault of his own (intolerably provoked by his stepfather, Travis had been forced to try and murder him with a fire poker).

Now,...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Zena Sutherland (essay date 27 January 1968)
   2. Times Literary Supplement (review date 30 October 1970)
   3. Jane Powell (review date 2 April 1976)
   4. S. E. Hinton with Lisa Ehrichs (interview date November 1981)
   5. Gene Lyons (essay date 11 October 1982)
   6. Jay Scott (essay date April 1983)
   7. Michael Malone (essay date 8 March 1986)
   8. Charlene Strickland (review date October 1988)
   9. Elizabeth Ward (review date 12 February 1989)
   10. Patty Campbell (review date 2 April 1989)
   11. Charles Solomon (review date 12 August 1990)
   12. Steven L. VanderStaay (essay date November 1992)
   13. Susanna Rodell (review date 19 November 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. S. E. Hinton