Susan Hinton's attention has always been directed towards the crucial, changing relationships of adolescence but in the thirteen years since the first publication of The Outsiders, when the young author was writing to some extent from her own experience, she has taken a larger canvas on which to group more varied characters. Tex has a wider spread than her earlier books, first and most obviously in the geographical sense, because her setting here is Californian farmland rather than city streets. This is something more than just an extended background. The tensions between Tex McCormick, who is fifteen, and his protective older brother Mason, are no less urgent and claustrophobic than those operating in the urban gangs of the earlier books, but they have an added force because of the isolation of the brothers in the dusty roads and paddocks where Tex rides his horse and his motor-bike, where...