Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Hinton, S(usan) E(loise) - Lance Salway

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LANCE SALWAY

[S. E. Hinton], it seems to me, gets right to the heart of how and why people behave towards one another, in this case two teenage brothers in rural Oklahoma…. Tex is the first of her books that I've read, but it certainly won't be the last…. [It's] a brilliant study of a fraternal relationship: moving, powerful, funny, and entirely convincing. It's odd, really, that the novel works so well when so many of the elements in the story are highly theatrical. The young narrator-hero, among other things, is kidnapped by a deranged gunman, is shot by a desperate junkie, and discovers that he isn't really his father's son. Each of these events would have sufficed for a novel on its own and it takes some courage to pack them all into one book. But a writer as good as Hinton can carry it off effortlessly; one believes implicitly in the characters and cares what happens to them.

Lance Salway, in an extract from "Book Post," in...

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1. Introduction
2. Lillian N. Gerhardt
3. Thomas Fleming
4. William Jay Jacobs
5. A. Chambers
6. Sheryl B. Andrews
7. Michael Cart
8. The Times Literary Supplement
9. John Rowe Townsend
10. Jane Abramson
11. Anita Silvey
12. Robert Berkvist
13. Dorothy Nimmo
14. The Council On Interracial Books For Children
15. Paxton Davis
16. Margery Fisher
17. Lance Salway
18. Susan Thompson
19. Copyright

1. S. E. Hinton