Tex

Written with one foot in adolescence and the other in the stirrup of something deeper.

Published in 1979, Tex was S.E. Hinton’s fourth novel, written in the years following the success of That Was Then, This Is Now. By then, she had graduated college, married, and was navigating the complexities of adulthood — but Tex is unmistakably a return to her roots: wide Oklahoma skies, broken-down pickup trucks, and boys trying to outrun the lives they were handed.

This novel carries a gentler tone than some of her earlier work — more nostalgic, more affectionate — but it’s no less raw in its emotional terrain. Hinton poured a great deal of herself into this story, setting it in a familiar landscape of rodeos and restlessness. She even named the dog after her real-life horse.

There’s humor here. There’s love. There’s pain. It’s Hinton with sun in her hair and calluses on her hands.

The Story

Fifteen-year-old Tex McCormick is easygoing, horse-loving, and dangerously content with his ragtag life in rural Oklahoma. He doesn’t have much — just his brother Mason, their creaky house, and their horse, Negrito — but that’s enough. At least, until Mason sells the horse behind Tex’s back to pay the bills.

And just like that, the innocence begins to unravel.

Their father’s off on the rodeo circuit, their mother is long gone, and Mason is barely holding things together with school and part-time jobs. Tex is left grappling with a changing world, with questions he doesn’t want to ask and feelings he can’t quite name.

There’s a girl he likes. A friend who’s slipping away. A sudden, spiraling threat of violence that cracks the quiet open wide.

Tex is a coming-of-age novel soaked in golden-hour light and the ache of being fifteen and not quite ready to stop being a kid. It’s about brothers — the ones who raise you, the ones who lose you, the ones you choose. And it’s about trying to hold on to wonder in a world that keeps asking you to let it go.