Taming the Star Runner

Hinton’s Most Autobiographical Novel

By the time S.E. Hinton published Taming the Star Runner in 1988, she had been writing professionally since her teens — writing was, by then, her identity and her vocation. This final YA novel is the one in which that experience most directly enters the story. Travis, sent to his uncle’s Oklahoma ranch after a dangerous confrontation with his stepfather, has a manuscript under his bed — a novel he is trying to get published — and much of the book’s quiet energy comes from watching him navigate both the rural world he has been dropped into and the uncertain process of finding out if he is actually a writer.

The writing subplot is handled without sentimentality. Travis’s manuscript is rejected, then accepted by a small publisher, then stalled again. The process is rendered with the unglamorous reality of actual literary submission rather than the fantasy of effortless discovery.

Casey and the Star Runner

The novel’s other center is Casey, who runs a horse stable on Travis’s uncle’s property and is attempting to train Star Runner, a beautiful and genuinely untrainable stallion. Casey is competent, emotionally self-sufficient, and uninterested in Travis’s romantic attention in the way Hinton’s female characters rarely are — she has her own life and her own ambitions and Travis is peripheral to both.

The horse becomes the novel’s central metaphor: something wild and beautiful that may not be tameable without losing what makes it extraordinary. The question of whether to tame Star Runner runs alongside the question of whether Travis can be reshaped into something functional — and whether that reshaping is worth the cost.

The Quietest Hinton

Taming the Star Runner lacks the visceral intensity of The Outsiders or the moral complexity of That Was Then, This Is Now, and readers coming to it expecting those qualities may be disappointed. What it offers instead is a more reflective, quieter kind of coming-of-age story — one in which the protagonist’s most important development happens in his imagination rather than in the street.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — Hinton’s most introspective novel, with a distinctive meditation on creative vocation and a memorable central metaphor — quieter than her best work but worth reading for fans of her earlier books.

Taming the Star Runner Review

Published in 1988, Taming the Star Runner is S.E. Hinton’s only novel written in the third person, and the shift in perspective signals a broader maturation. Travis, a troubled teenager sent to live on his uncle’s ranch after a violent incident with his stepfather, is a recognisably Hinton protagonist — angry, defensive, more sensitive than he lets on — but the book around him is more reflective and more interested in the possibility of change than her earlier work. It is a novel about displacement, about being pulled out of the only world you know and forced to discover who you are without it.

The Horse and the Boy

The Star Runner of the title is a wild, dangerous horse that no one can ride, and the parallel between the untameable animal and the untameable boy is the book’s organising metaphor. Hinton handles it with more restraint than the premise might suggest. Travis’s relationship with the horse, and with Casey, the young woman who boards and trains it, becomes the vehicle through which he begins to understand that strength and control are not the same thing, and that some things — horses, people, futures — cannot be forced into the shape you want for them.

A Writer’s Self-Portrait

The most personal thread in the novel is Travis’s identity as a writer. He has written a book, and over the course of the story it is accepted for publication — a clear echo of Hinton’s own teenage experience of publishing The Outsiders. Through Travis, Hinton reflects on the strangeness of having one’s private creative life suddenly made public, and on the gap between the person who writes and the person the world sees. It gives the novel an autobiographical resonance absent from her earlier books and reads, in places, like an older writer considering her own beginnings.

The Last of the Tulsa Novels

Taming the Star Runner was Hinton’s final novel for young adults, and it serves as a fitting capstone. The fury that powered The Outsiders and Rumble Fish has not vanished, but it has been tempered by a hard-won belief that people can, with the right circumstances and the right relationships, begin to change. Travis is not redeemed by the end so much as opened — pointed, tentatively, toward a future he could not have imagined in the world he came from. It is a quieter, more hopeful note on which to close a body of work defined by its honesty about how hard growing up actually is.

Hinton in the Third Person

Taming the Star Runner (1988) is notable as the only one of Hinton’s novels written in the third person rather than the first, a sign of her stretching beyond the intimate voice that made The Outsiders famous. Travis, a troubled teenager sent to live on his uncle’s ranch after a violent incident, finds a tentative purchase on a better life through the spirited horse Star Runner and the young woman who trains her. The novel pairs Hinton’s familiar sympathy for the angry, misunderstood adolescent with a new interest in the discipline and patience that taming — of a horse, and of a self — requires.