SOURCE: A review of Taming the Star Runner, in The New York Times Book Review, April 2, 1989, p. 26.

In the following review, Campbell offers praise for the compelling nature of Taming the Star Runner as well as for the authenticity of its characters, but finds fault with Hinton's use of the horse as a symbol.

"His boot felt empty without his knife in it," begins S. E. Hinton's fifth novel, Taming the Star Runner. A young hood, desperately tough and desperately vulnerable, is on his way to exile on his uncle's horse ranch—and in one paragraph the reader is back in familiar Hinton country after a hiatus of 10 years. What bearing does this new book have on the literary and popular reputation of Susan Eloise Hinton, who at 16 wrote The Outsiders, a novel that, in 1967, gave birth to the new realism in adolescent literature, and who has since...