SOURCE: "Young Bookshelf," in The Washington Post Book World, February 12, 1989, p. 9.

In the following excerpt, Ward offers a negative assessment of Taming the Star Runner, describing the characters as superficial and self-absorbed and asserting that the prose falls flat.

In [Taming the Star Runner,] her first novel since Tex, published 10 years ago, the phenomenally popular S. E. Hinton returns to the familiar territory of teen-age disaffection and the search for happiness.

Good-looking Travis, with his blackfringed, gray-green eyes, as cold as the Irish sea, is neither a doper nor a straight, but a sensitive, intelligent, creative, profoundly misunderstood cat-lover, who has recently become a juvenile delinquent through no fault of his own (intolerably provoked by his stepfather, Travis had been forced to try and murder him with a fire poker).

Now, emerging from a spell in juvenile hall, he tells us that "his boot felt empty without his...