Two things made me know I wanted to read this book – the first being it was written by Moxie author Jennifer Mathieu, and the second being that it was billed as a gender-flipped reimagining of The Outsiders. The Outsiders was the first novel I bought myself as a seventh grader (and I still have it), so I was very interested in seeing what Mathieu did with it.
Our “Ponyboy” is Evie Barnes, a fifteen-year-old bad girl with bad girl friends, Connie, Sunny, and Juanita. Evie lives with her mother and grandmother and has an older sister, Cheryl, who “had” to get married and now lives with her military husband in base housing. One night at the drive-in, Evie makes the mistake of going to the bathroom alone, where she is attacked by a boy from the “right side of the tracks.” Evie passes out, and when she awakens, she is met by Diane Farris, a former River Oaks girl who now attends Eastside High. Diane is covered in blood and confesses she has killed the boy attacking Evie, but that she just meant to scare him.
Over the course of the book, it is easy to spot characters inspired by S.E. Hinton – Betty, a former friend of Diane serving as the Cherry Valance, Connie, whose parents don’t notice she or her brother are alive except when beating them, reminiscent of Johnny Cade. Diane herself seems a combination of Dallas and Johnny. But the relationships between the girls is all-original. Taking place in Houston in 1964, Mathieu paints a world where girls don’t have many options and where there’s a fine line between a good girl and a bad one.
I cried when the book ended, which tells me Mathieu created such a real world for her bad girls that I was sucked in completely. If you’re a fan of The Outsiders, you will love this book. (You might love it even if you’re not a fan.) Fabulous story, well-defined characters, and a breath of fresh historical fiction air for a modern society.
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