Brett’s Letter Essay #12: The Outsiders

The Outsiders Letter Essay 12

I just finished reading the book ” The Outsiders” an 180 page realistic fiction novel about a group of boys who live on  the “bad” part of town. They alwasy get into trouble but they respect one another equaly and are very loyal to each other. The main character is the youngest of them all. His name is Ponyboy  and he is 14 years old. He has 2 older brothers who look after him like parents. One of them Sodapop is the middle aged brother and Ponyboy loves him. The other is Darry who is the oldest in the family. Ponyboy doesn’t care for Darry because he is always yelling at Ponyboy for not using his head. One night Darry has had enough of Ponyboy because he just doesn’t use his head. Ponyboy gets home very late and Darry yells and yells at him. Ponyboy fights back by yelling back and suddenly Darry slaps him right across the face. Hard. Nobody has ever hit Ponyboy before and Ponyboy runs right out of the door and runs away. He brings his friend Johnny with him. When Ponyboy and Johnny get cold and are looking to go home later that night they run into serious trouble and have to run from the police not just Ponyboy’s brother. Read the book to find out how they get in trouble and how it ends.

I chose this book because I have already read it before and watched the movie and we had to chose this book or a different book for book clubs.  I loved it the first time and liked it about the same if not more the second time. But I still do wish that the author had explained a little bit more at the end about the future of Ponyboy and his brothers after everything seltted down. I also wanted to know what would happen after Ponyboy recovered from being sick. I was interested on how much ponyboy hated his brother in the begining and how much he loved him in the end.

A passage from the book that I really enjoyed was: ” My face got hot as I bit my lip. Darry… what was darry like? “He’s…” I started to say he’s a good ol’ guy but I couldn’t. I burst out bitterly. ” He’s not like sodapop at all and he sure ain’t like me. He’s hard as a rock and about as human. He’s got eyes exactly like frozen ice. He thinks I’m a pain in the neck. He likes soda -everybody likes soda but he can’t stand me. I bet he wishes he could stick me in a home somewhere, and he’d do it too, if soda’d let him.” (Pg. 42, 43)

I really liked this passage because it shows how much Ponyboy really does hate Darry. It shows how mcuh things change from the begining of the book to the end of the book. I really enjoyed reading ” The Outsiders.” This is my second time reading it and it was just as good the second time, I would reccomend it to anyone and rate it a 9 out of 10.

Brett Hugo

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