The Things They Carried (1990) - Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried (1990) – Tim O’Brien
Broadway, 248 pages, ISBN 9780767902892

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Awards:

National Book Critics Circle Award, 1990

Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (best foreign work of fiction), 1990

Pulitzer Prize finalist, 1990



Annotation: The soldiers of Alpha Company march through the midst of the Vietnam War, a war they scarcely understand in a place that they cannot explain. Through a series of related short stories, O’Brien shows readers both the horrors of war and the bond that soldier share.

Review: Each of the short stories that make up The Things They Carried connects to create a unified work that expertly shows the humor, horror, madness, camaraderie, helplessness, hopelessness, pain, and even excitement of war. Although Vietnam is the setting of the work, O’Brien is more concerned with telling the (fictional) stories of the men of Alpha Company rather than examining the war itself.

The men in O’Brien’s company (The author also appears as a character.) each have their own stories, reflecting not only their individual backgrounds and beliefs, but also their fears, hopes, sense of lost innocence, and sometimes even joys. These characters are also us, reflecting the state of an America trying to grasp the meaning of the Vietnam War. These stories are fictional, but as one character says in “Good Form,” “Story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.” Like war itself, The Things They Carried is gut-wrenching, horrific, sad and painful, but also uplifting and hopeful.

The Outsiders (1967) - S.E. Hinton

The Outsiders (1967) - S.E. Hinton
Puffin, ISBN 9780142407332, 180 pages

Recorded Books (1993), ISBN 0788737384
5 compact discs, narrated by Spike McClure

(photo credit: www.goodreads.com)

Awards and Honors:

New York Herald Tribune Best Teenage Books List, 1967

Chicago Tribune Book World Spring Book Festival Honor Book, 1967

Media and Methods Maxi Award, 1975

ALA Best Young Adult Books, 1975

Massachusetts Children's Book Award, 1979



Annotation: Two groups of teenage boys from different sides of an Oklahoma town struggle for recognition and respect. Ponyboy, one of the Greasers, struggles not only with the rival Socs, but also against members of his own family.

Review:
I don't know if The Outsiders deserves the moniker it's often given, "The First Young Adult Novel," but I do know that it has a power that's undeniable, even after more than forty years. Although Ponyboy is part of a real family (consisting of his two brothers Darry and Sodapop), he's also part of a larger family: the Greasers, kids who are just on the verge of becoming a gang, but mostly just want to be left alone. They probably would be, if not for the antagonism of the wealthy and privileged Socs.

Hinton was smart enough (even as a high school student, when she wrote the novel) to avoid cardboard characters and predictable scenes of gang violence. Instead, she gives us believable characters with real problems, problems we've all had in trying to get along in this world. Sometimes there are no easy answers and no easy ways out of some types of conflict. Yet The Outsiders shows us that things don't have to remain the way they've always been. Maybe that's why the novel has stood the test of time.