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S. E. Hinton's Taming The Star Runner

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S.E. Hinton is commonly referred to as one of the best authors of all time when it comes to teen literature. In fact, she received the Margaret A. Edwards award, which honors authors who have written novels that capture the hearts of young adults and provides insight to their actual lives. Being a young adult myself, I can honestly say that she is my favorite author of all time. Her other works including The Outsiders, That Was Then This Is Now, and Tex helped initiate my love for English in school. Even though my love for S.E. Hinton and her work has always been a constant in my life, I began reading Taming the Star Runner with very high hopes and was left disappointed. Taming the Star Runner was not a terrible book, it was one that …show more content…

My biggest pet peeve with the novel is the fact that it was written in the third person. S.E. Hinton had written four young adult novels prior to Taming the Star Runner. The only difference between all of those novels and Taming the Star Runner is that they were all written in the first person. Most of the time, the main character was the narrator. I personally prefer writing and reading novels in the first person point of view, because it helps the reader and/or the writer connect to the characters in a way they never thought imaginable. It is almost like you are inside the main character’s head and you are feeling everything they feel. In this novel, I never felt heavily impacted by any of the character’s emotions or life problems. Ponyboy, in The Outsiders, would describe things in very vivid detail. Not once while reading Taming the Star Runner was I able to visualize the setting and the characters in my head. There was not one moment where an event or characters were told or introduced in beautiful detail. It almost seems like she was rushed to publish it and wrote it without all of her heart in it. To be completely honest, I forgot S.E. Hinton wrote the book while I was reading it, because the style she wrote Taming the Star Runner in was unrecognizable. Overall, S.E. Hinton excels in writing in the first person, and in my opinion, made a career-altering mistake with trying to write in the third person for Taming the Star

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