That was then, this is now Review

That Was Then, This Is Now review: when loyalty stops being innocence

This That Was Then, This Is Now review centers S. E. Hinton's novel on the changing bond between Bryon Douglas and Mark. They have grown up with the intimacy of brothers and the habits of boys who survive through charm, fighting, and shared risk. The title names the rupture before the plot explains it: what once counted as loyalty cannot remain morally sufficient when violence and drugs expose the consequences of Mark's code.

Bryon narrates from inside the change. His voice is direct, observant, and less innocent than he initially understands. Because Mark does not receive an equal viewpoint, readers experience maturity as Bryon's discovery and must still ask what his account cannot comprehend about the friend he condemns.

Bryon and Mark: brotherhood built on permission

Mark's charisma depends on speed, confidence, and a refusal to recognize conventional limits. Bryon has long admired those traits because they make danger feel manageable. Their friendship works partly by mutual permission: each boy accepts behavior from the other that an outsider might name as cruelty, theft, or recklessness.

Hinton does not begin with a clean moral contrast. Bryon participates in the same world and benefits from Mark's nerve. His later judgment therefore carries guilt. Growing up means recognizing that affection does not erase responsibility, but it also means admitting how long affection helped normalize harm.

The quasi-brother relationship gives Bryon's decision its force. Turning against Mark is not equivalent to reporting a stranger. It breaks a shared identity and exposes that Bryon's new morality has no painless form.

Charlie, violence, and the end of romantic danger

Charlie's bar initially belongs to the boys' social geography, a place where adult danger and adolescent performance overlap. The violence surrounding Charlie's death strips that danger of glamour. Bryon can no longer treat fights and weapons as episodes that prove nerve and end when the boys escape.

The event changes the novel's moral temperature. Hinton's prose remains spare, avoiding elaborate psychological commentary, but Bryon's perception accumulates consequence. Violence is not only what rivals do to one another. It leaves adults dead, debts unpaid, and survivors forced to reconsider the stories they told about bravery.

Readers comparing action-centered young adult fiction through young adult will find that the novel's decisive movement is inward. The external plot matters because it destroys Bryon's ability to keep interpreting harm as adventure.

Cathy, M&M, and responsibility beyond the pair

Cathy opens a relation not wholly organized by Bryon and Mark's shared past. Through her, Bryon becomes attentive to M&M, whose vulnerability and alienation do not fit the boys' code. M&M's disappearance and drug experience shift drugs from rumor or trade into visible damage.

Mark's involvement in selling drugs becomes the point at which Bryon can no longer separate loyalty from complicity. The novel's treatment is shaped by its period and can feel blunt in its representation of drug use. Even so, the structural purpose is clear: Bryon encounters a harmed person linked to someone he cares about, and the abstract defense of Mark's freedom collapses.

Cathy sometimes functions more as a catalyst for Bryon's development than as a fully independent center. That limitation is part of the novel's narrow first-person frame, not a reason to ignore her ethical importance.

The decision to turn Mark in

Bryon's decision is impulsive and deliberate at once. He discovers the drugs, understands their relation to M&M's suffering, and contacts the authorities. Hinton refuses to make the act feel triumphant. The law offers a boundary that Bryon cannot enforce alone, but using it destroys the trust on which his closest relationship was built.

The scene raises a difficult distinction between betrayal and accountability. Mark experiences only betrayal because his ethic treats loyalty as absolute. Bryon recognizes that absolute loyalty can become permission for another person's harm. The novel does not grant him comfort for arriving at that recognition.

This is the book's strongest theme: maturity is not the acquisition of correct opinions but the loss of moral arrangements that once made life coherent. Bryon acts, yet action does not restore M&M, Charlie, or the friendship.

The ending and moral rupture without reconciliation

The later meeting between Bryon and Mark refuses sentimental repair. Mark's hostility and emotional distance show that punishment has not produced shared understanding. Bryon confronts a version of his friend he can no longer reach, and he must consider whether something in Mark was always beyond the story of brotherhood he preferred.

The ending is severe because Bryon also loses confidence in his own capacity to feel. Maturity has not made him whole; it has made the past unavailable. The title's “now” is ethically clearer and emotionally poorer.

Readers who need explicit redemption may find this conclusion bleak. Those who value endings that preserve consequence will see why reconciliation would weaken the novel. Crocodile Tears offers a different relation between adolescent danger and moral choice, while Airman changes the genre machinery around loyalty and betrayal.

Style, period, and limitations

Hinton's first-person prose is economical, colloquial, and accessible. It rarely pauses for a formal argument; judgment emerges through shifts in what Bryon notices. This makes the book effective for younger readers without making its moral conflict simple.

Some character roles are compressed. Cathy and M&M chiefly reshape Bryon's conscience, and Mark's interiority remains inferred. The representation of drug culture carries the alarm and simplification of its era. Readers should also understand that the novel belongs in conversation with Hinton's connected social world, even though it can be read independently.

Up the Line is a tonal and formal contrast rather than a close alternative. Such contrasts help reveal how little speculative machinery Hinton needs: a friendship and one irreversible choice are enough.

What Bryon's narration cannot settle

Bryon can explain why he reported Mark, but narration does not grant him complete authority over the meaning of that act. Readers may agree with the decision and still question the speed with which Cathy, M&M, and the law become parts of Bryon's moral awakening. Hinton leaves productive discomfort around responsibility: Mark caused harm, Bryon enabled earlier harm, and punishment cannot restore the people their choices affected. The unresolved distribution of guilt keeps the novel from becoming a lesson with one answer.

The compact length intensifies this uncertainty. Hinton does not provide years of aftermath that would stabilize judgment. Bryon speaks while the rupture remains close enough to distort every conclusion he offers.

Reader fit and final assessment

The book best suits readers interested in male friendship, moral injury, violence, and coming of age without guaranteed reconciliation. It is less suitable for readers seeking a balanced dual perspective, a gentle treatment of drug harm, or a redemptive ending.

That Was Then, This Is Now succeeds because Bryon's judgment of Mark implicates Bryon himself. Charlie's death, Cathy and M&M, the hidden drugs, the call to the police, and the final estrangement make maturity costly. Hinton's compact style sometimes narrows secondary characters and carries period assumptions, but it does not offer an easy moral prize. Bryon learns that love cannot make every action permissible. He also learns that refusing permission may end the relationship through which he understood his own past.