The boy who didn't love the girl who loved Tom Gordon
Written: Feb 01 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great writing. Great survival story
Cons: Things worked out too well. Not a horror story. Dragged on in the middle.
The Bottom Line: Its a really good survival story, but the the description presents it like a horror. Not scary at all. May not be what you're expecting. Dragged on at times
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| cobadee's Full Review: Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Books |
Lean and Mean review
Stephen King is my favorite author, and lately, I've been trying to zoom through his books as fast as I can. I'll be honest... one of the deciding factors of this one was the length.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon shows the story of a young girl whom one day, during a walk with her family, is tired of the arguments between her divorced parents and her brother, so she says that she has to go to the bathroom. After the break she can't find her way back to the trail. She tries to find her way back onto the trail, and never gives up. She travels for weeks and weeks, feeling that she is followed, not really knowing where she is going, but following a stream of water. She remembers someone telling her that a stream of water always leads to the ocean and she tries to believe it but develops a hate for the stream. She feels she is being stalked by something in the woods, as she finds torn up animals in her path, but surprisingly, this enemy really isn't a huge part of the story. She is comforted every night by hallucinations Tom Gordon, her favorite Baseball player.
The back of the book makes it sound like a horror story, but it really isn't. The villain really isn't that important. The book really tells the story of a little girl traveling through the woods, then settling in an area, getting frightened by a noise, and then moving on.
The thing that I really disliked was the amount of deus ex machina. Everything just seemed to work. Trisha didn't seem like the girl who would know anything about survival, yet she would find some berries when she was about to starve and it would just happen to be a type of berry that someone in her past had told her it was safe to eat. When it appears she is going to die she will generally find something at the last second. Sometimes its believable sometimes its not.
Being a novel where a girl really doesn't talk to anyone, King really focuses in on the psyche of the nine year old. Her thoughts are often believable, and King definitely pays a lot of attention to the innocence of her age, when his stories like Misery had the guy cussing up a storm. She's a believable nine year old, but at times seems a little too mature for her age.
Overall its a good book that's worth the read, but its a lot slower than I was expecting. Most of the book doesn't show her any danger other than the danger of starvation and thirst until the very end where things start getting weird. There's not much horror, but there's a lot of good survival. The story did pick up at the end. It may not be Stephen King's normal horror story, but its still pretty good.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
cobadee
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Member: Josh
Location: Idaho
Reviews written: 231
Trusted by: 62 members
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