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Susan Eloise Hinton, 34, wrote the novel when she was a 16-year-old Tulsa schoolgirl. "I was reading horse books then," says Hinton, who started using her initials so boys would also read her works. To date, her four gritty novels have sold 7 million copies, and all are in some stage of development for films. Francis Ford Coppola has finished shooting The Outsiders, and is currently making Rumble Fish. That Was Then, This Is Now has been optioned; Tex, starring Teen Idol Matt Dillon, has been released by Walt Disney Productions. The married Hinton, who owns a horse named Toyota, has no plans to write adult fiction. Says she: "I'd rather claim authorship of My Friend Flicka than Princess Daisy."
Secrets of the Shopping Mall, award-winning Author Richard Peck's ninth Y.A., satirizes teen class structure and cliquishness. Teresa and Barney, a pair of inner-city runaways, discover a society of boys and girls living secretly in a department store. This "Lord & Taylor of the Flies" is surrounded by specialty shops like Audio Jungle, the Tennis Connection and a place advertising CANDLES IN SHAPES YOU NEVER THOUGHT OF. There, the urban dropouts learn the value of independent thought, honest employment and all-natural fabrics. They also can identify suburbanites: "It looked like an oversized praying mantis, and it flowed like a surfer. As it swept nearer, Teresa saw it was somebody in cutoffs and knee warmers, a girl because she had an elastic top. She was riding a skateboard and wearing headphones clamped over both ears. She looked like . . . something intelligent but brutal from science fiction." Peck, 48, an American who attended Oxford, echoes his colleagues in teen realism when he says, "We rarely celebrate the captains of athletic teams; the most popular girl in school or the gang leader. We write for and about people who are gathering strength, solvers of problems."
Nevertheless, the form is fragile, and pressing it too hard can have bizarre results. Scott Bunn's forthcoming Just Hold On, for example, is serious but unfortunately reads like a literary version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Heroine Charlotte Maag, 16, is raped by her father, an Albany pediatrician. She befriends fellow Loner Stephen Herndon, who is hiding the shame and rejection of his own physician-father's alcoholism. By midstory Charlotte is on the sauce, Stephen is involved in a homosexual affair with a football star named Rolf, and both tumble into bed with another couple after a bourbon and pot party. At novel's end, Stephen is near catatonia, and Charlotte is institutionalized. One can hardly wait for Just Hold On II.
— By J.D. Reed.
Reported by Maureen Dowd/ New York