The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

This concept is genius. King manages to accurately capture the mind of a child through not only the infatuation with a famous person, but also the terrifying reality of getting lost. I never felt like I was reading an adult pretending to be a child. This was convincing.

And it was terrifying in a real way. After reading Carrie, I knew Stephen King knew how to write supernatural horror. But this is purely natural horror, something that happens to people, and yes, children, every year. It is an awful thought to ponder.

I've been on a King kick recently, and this was the cherry on top.

Stephen King is always a great storyteller. He has a talent for the linking the things that make us most human to the things we most dread and making us care as much as we fear. During the course of his (usually long) books, he slowly lures us into the places where the supernatural is so close, we can smell the rotting flesh of its last meal on its breath.

I'd expected him to do that again with “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon”. I’d thought I’d get a tense story about the bad things that happen to little girls who get lost in the woods, invoking all the things that lurk in the deep dark and remind us what it feels like to be prey.

Instead, Stephen King did something quite different and wonderful: he narrowed his focus down to the show more internal dialogue that drives Trish, nine years old, almost ten and big for age, to persist in struggling not to die in vast Maine woods that she is alone and lost in.

In some ways, this is a book in which nothing much happens. Trish gets separated from her mother and brother and finds herself lost in the woods and does her best to find a way to walk out again. Yet, from the beginning, I kept wanting to know what happened next and by the end I cared passionately about whether Trish would survive.

Trish is brave and resourceful and unyielding. She’s also, as she tells us from time to time, just a kid. She’s afraid. She’s furious at the unfairness of her situation. She cries. She throws tantrums. Then she persists.

Following along with Trisha, we learn about her (recently divorced) parents, her brother, her best friend and her favourite boy bands. We share her triumphs, her setbacks, her hallucinations and her growing awareness, as the days pass, that death is stalking her.

Trisha has two prized possessions with her, her Red Sox baseball cap, signed by Tom Gordon, her favourite player, and a Sony Walkman that allows her to listen to distance Sox games when the forest night surrounds her. The games become her anchor, a symbol of her hope, a connection to the world she is trying to get back to. Tom Gordon, who is the Sox closer, brought in at the end of the game to close down the other team, becomes the emblem of her courage and the means by which she explains to herself her relationship with growing probability to of her own death. From him she learns that you may be beaten by the other team but you should never be beaten by yourself.

The writing is wonderful, simple on the surface but with flowing rhythms beneath the entrance the ear and build meanings on simple phrases until a verbal Fibonacci Sequence unfolds. Stephen King can take a radio jingle, “Who do you call when your windscreen ‘s busted” and turn it into a leitmotiv for the desire for rescue. The pace is perfectly controlled and cleverly structured around the innings of a baseball game.

I recommend the audiobook version of “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon”. It’s performed by Anne Hech, who does a superb job of making Trisha real and made this an even better read. show less

Stephen King knows how to tell you a story, and tell it masterfully. After just a few lines, there you are, lost in the woods together with Trisha (who is awesome).

The woods are real, as well as the fear, the panic, the hunger, things hiding and watching you in the dark. Slowly, the outside world disappears and Walkman radio is the only link to the rest of humanity.

I believe that I’ve read very few books that follow a single character, have a relatively small scope, and don’t let you catch your breath. How was this done? The power of the writing is impressive. I liked the descriptions of nature, various details, and Trisha's inner monologues.

I liked that the reader was free to choose both rational and supernatural explanations for show more things that happen in the woods. I found myself somewhere in the middle.

The ending was a catharsis. Thanks to Nataliya for letting me know this book existed :) show less

A haunting story about a nine year old girl who wanders off the trail while her family his hiking. She needs to pee, but she's also fed up with the constant bickering of her mother and brother. It feels like the don't even notice she's there, and so she resigns herself to being ignored and walks out of sight of the path. When she's done her business in the woods, she attempts to take a short cut back to the path but misses it and is soon terribly lost. The woods are dense and thick and she just keeps going deeper and deeper. This book recounts her struggle to survive and the strange visions she sees while alone, dehydrated, and starving in the forest. It is a novel of primal fear and

Holy hell. What a wild ride. I was sitting on the roof of my house with traffic from the road in the background and still got chills. I just don't understand why this book has poor reviews. Apart from being rich with description that just bursts forth from each page, this is a close look into the mind of someone clinging to sanity by a thread, a brave experiment by Stephen King to get inside the terrified mind of a child losing her grip on reality.

between 2.5 and 3, i guess. there's nothing actually wrong with this. and it's even pretty good and i generally didn't want to put it down when i was reading. it's just not quite as much as it could be. like in cujo, he puts in this entirely unnecessary supernatural element that ends up (in my opinion) detracting from the terrifying reality that he's describing. both of these books would be stronger with only the scary reality he creates, and adding something supernatural takes away from them both. that, though, it really my only real complaint about the book. other than just wanting a little more in general.

but the framing he uses of the baseball game and tom gordon in general is really well done. it works great and i loved this thread show more through the book and how "conversations" that trisha has with him early on come back into play later. it's a good device and works well. as is the aphorisms and phrases trisha says and then attributes to someone in her family. that was another nice thread.

i enjoyed this even as i was wishing for a little more out of it. but overall i really liked it. it even evoked some good memories around listening to radio broadcasts of baseball when i was young, and falling asleep listening to john miller and the orioles in the summer. her feeling about tom gordon mirrored mine about cal ripken and he depicted it well. show less

Book on CD performed by Anne Heche

A young girl who loves baseball (and particularly one Red Sox player) takes a few steps off the path when on a hike through the Appalachian Trail with her mother and older brother. In the blink of an eye, she is lost and trying very hard not to be terrified.

King is a master craftsman and he is never better than when playing on all our childhood (and adult) fears, magnifying them tenfold and letting his (and our) imagination carry us away.

I loved Trisha McFarland! She’s resilient, intelligent, and brave. She’s also young and makes some wrong decisions which get her farther into trouble. (Number one rule of being lost in the woods – STOP moving, stay put and wait for rescue … but if she’d show more followed that rule there wouldn’t be much to the novel.)

I grew up going camping with my family. We slept out in the open (no tent), though we usually had a tarp of some kind to keep off the rain. But I don’t think I could fare half so well as young Trisha did. She remembered a science class that helped her, and lessons her mother imparted on other nature hikes helped her forage for a few berries or edible ferns.

This is not to say that she had an easy time of it. The “tough tootsie” voice in her head definitely shoots holes in each theory and idea Trisha has, filling her with doubt and increasing her fears. The noises and violence of nature can be frightening and shocking to anyone, let alone a nine-year-old town girl, not accustomed to such experiences. It’s easy to imagine boogie men and monsters lurking in the dark (not to mention the real dangers of snakes, poisonous plants and predators). The best thing she did, however, was keep her spirits up by relying on her beloved Tom Gordon, the Red Sox “closer.” It was those “conversations,” and using her Walkman to listen to the ball games, that sustained her and gave her hope and courage.

Anne Heche did a marvelous job of performing the audio version. She knocked it out of the park! 5**** for her narration. show less