Kids of Appetite – David Arnold

Kids of Appetite
David Arnold
September 20, 2016
Viking Books for Young Readers

I’ll preface this review with a disclaimer that The Outsiders is my favorite book of all time. At 13, it was the first book I ever finished and immediately went back and reread cover to cover. I’ve read it upwards of 20 times, and watch the film at least once a year, crying from the moment Ponyboy steps out of the movie theatre until he steps back out again. (Just to put things in perspective, I also cry from beginning to end of The Muppet Movie and the majority of The Goonies – if you can figure that one out please let me and my therapist know. We’re both really curious.)  That being said, I’m always wary when authors use Hinton’s book, as it has a tendency to be used as a kind of shortcut for character development. In the same way that a “reader-girl” is shorthand for moral goodness, a reference to The Outsiders is often used as a quick way of understanding that character as a misunderstood misfit or loner.

So, I was apprehensive when I saw that Arnold’s newest book relies heavily on The Outsiders for inspiration and plot development. However, despite these reservations, it quickly became clear that Kids of Appetite not only did its inspiration justice but has earned its place right along side it.

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Two years after his father’s death, Vic is still grieving the loss of the man who taught him to see beauty in asymmetry, Matisse, and himself – a difficult hurdle for Vic, who has Moebius Syndrome. The rare neurological disorder causes facial paralysis, resulting in Vic’s inability to control his facial features, smile, or even blink.

Reeling from his mother’s new engagement, Vic runs away from home, his father’s ashes in hand. In his search for a way to commemorate his father, Vic meets Mad – our second narrator and member of a gang of homeless teens. This unconventional family consists of brothers Baz and Zuz, soft-spoken Congolese refugees; Coco, a faux-foul mouthed 11-year-old with some serious sass; and Mad, a beautiful and devoted reader of The Outsiders, and the soon-to-be object of Vic’s affections. Vic finds himself adopted by this eponymous gang of misfits, all brought together through extreme misfortune and forged together through genuine love and affection.

It is through these relationships that Kids of Appetite goes a step further than any other novel I’ve found citing Hinton for inspiration, as Arnold captures the very thing that made me fall in love with it when I was 13: its goodness. Beneath their rocky exteriors, just like Ponyboy’s gang of greasers, the KOA cling to each other, fervently love and depend on one another. It is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.

I took my time with this book, stopping at almost every chapter to allow myself to really take in Arnold’s gorgeous and downright envy-inducing prose. It could have easily edged into the maudlin, but somehow stayed just clear.  The story is told through Vic and Mad’s alternating perspectives, occasionally interrupted by police interrogation scenes, in which the two are defending one of their own of a crime the reader doesn’t fully understand until the novels simultaneously hopeful and heartbreaking end.