The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Novel

The book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King is a book based on nine year old Trisha McFarland and the struggles she faces when she finds herself lost in the woods, on what she thought was just another normal day taking a hike with her mother and brother. After straying off the path, Trisha was fighting for her own survival. Stephen focused the book fully on fear, along with all the emotions and obstacles that Trisha faces. This book is a horror fiction novel based out of the woods of the Appalachian Trail in Maine that winds toward New Hampshire in 1998. I personally thought that there were a few little parts throughout the book that were kind of slow, just Trisha walking through the woods, but yet I never lost interest in the book. Other than that, I really enjoyed the book. I definitely felt a connection with Trisha in the book. I always was worried about what was going to happen to her and hoped that she would make it out of the woods. Trisha McFarland is the daughter of Quilla Anderson and Pete McFarland, who were just recently divorced. Her brother, Pete, is having a hard time handling the situation and wished he could have stayed with his father. Pete and his mother continuously fight about everything, but mostly the divorce. Quilla decided that they needed to spend some family time together, so they started doing something together every Saturday that Trisha and Pete weren’t with their father. This weekends trip was a six-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail. As they were bickering on the hike, Trisha slowly lost sight of her mother and brother as she went looking for a place to go to the bathroom. Trisha ends up by herself, lost, and not sure what to do. All she has with her is her backpack and the clothes that are on her back. Trisha used the walkman that was in her backpack to listen to the Red Sox games every night. Trisha’s favorite player on the Red Sox was closing pitcher, Tom Gordon. Throughout her journey she used her imagination to visualize that Tom Gordon was there with her in the woods. Imagining that Tom was there with her helped Trisha make it through the day a lot easier. She talked to Tom everyday as she walked through the woods. Trisha was my favorite character in the book, not just because she was the main one, but because of how brave and strong she was the whole time while being lost in the woods by herself. As a nine year old girl and being lost by herself in the woods for almost ten days, I think that she held it together very well. She definitely had some knowledge about plants and berries, which played a huge part in her survival. Without that previous knowledge, she could have easily not survived as long. Stephen King, also known as “The King of Terror”, is one of today’s most well-known and best-selling horror-thriller authors. King has a very unique style of writing that stands out to many readers. King writes in such a way that his readers are able to not just read the book, but they are able to visualize what was going on. The book was based in the year 1998, and it takes place in Western Maine on the Appalachian Trail. The book is written in third-person point of view, but for most of the story it is written in such a way that it seems that Trisha is the narrator. At times though, King would jump to Quilla’s or Pete’s point of view, or just plainly give us some insight on what was going on outside of the woods. I think that The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is definitely worth reading. I’m not a person who likes to read a lot, but yet I found myself not being able to put the book down at times. This is actually the first book I have read by King, but I absolutely enjoyed it and plan on reading more of his books.

If you're a hiker or simply love to visit parks and enjoy nature (I am both), you've probably wondered at some point what it would be like to be lost in the woods (if you haven't already had that experience). Either way, when you read this book, you will feel like you have been lost in the wilderness with Trisha McFarland.

My favorite quality of Stephen King's work is his ability to create an extremely detailed account of what his characters are seeing and feeling. I've read this book at least four times over the years because it's easy to become absorbed in the process of getting lost with Trisha as she makes choice after choice that takes her farther and farther into isolated, wild territory. It's also inspiring because she is very resourceful in her desperate bid for survival. Love of her family and a baseball team plays a part in shoring up the strength of her mental state, thus the title relation. This story makes you think about what you would do if you were suddenly cut off from everything you know and love. Who is the first person you would miss? What else would you feel you could not do without? You want to cheer for Trisha to get back to her life, which although imperfect as is everyone's, is perceptively dear to her. The story also starts to dip into the mystical, like looking into a fun house mirror, you wonder, along with the main character, if things really are what they appear to be or something else entirely, not of this world.

I can say for certain this is my favorite Stephen King book and would fully recommend it to be enjoyed over and over again. I appreciate that there is not a lot of gore in it, which allows Stephen King's adeptness for creating rich verbal descriptions to stand alone without much of a shock factor. As readers and movie goers, we all know and love Stephen King for his scary tales, but I think it's important to appreciate his descriptions of environment and feeling on their own. He makes reading more vibrant and palpable. That's what draws me back to some of his books again and again. This would be a good read on a vacation to the mountains or woods! I'm going out on a limb here, no pun intended, but let's face it, sometimes we read to get lost and get away from the normal stress of life; well this book will help you get lost for a little while. Enjoy!

Other books by Stephen King with similar attributes mentioned in this review are The Long Walk, From a Buick 8, and Rose Madder.

We live our entire lives on the beaten path, never daring to stray from its safe boundaries, but there is another world adjacent to the one we live in. A mere step or two to the left or right of our everyday existence will carry us into a place where the usual rules do not apply; a place where things do not always make sense and where the terrors of the night have teeth.

Trisha McFarland was a pretty typical nine-year-old when she inadvertently entered that other world. On a hike through the Maine woods with her family, Trisha stepped off the path, only for a moment, but that one moment was all it took. Trisha forgot, as so many of us do, that there are still places in this world where there are no telephones, no paved roads, no grownups to help us out of our jams.

Trisha is a trooper, though, she never gives up. Her instincts tell her to keep moving; this is not where she wants to be, so she must find a way out. So that's what she does, as one day fades into another, and another, she keeps moving, keeps trying. A couple of times, Trisha hears and sees search helicopters, off in the distance. She knows they are looking for her, but the searchers would be dumbfounded to know that Trisha is already nearly thirty miles away.

Trisha's only link with the world she left behind, is her walkman radio. When the terror of her situation begins to overwhelm her, she finds some small comfort in listening to her favorite baseball player, and current heart-throb, Tom Gordon of the Boston Red Sox. As the days pass, she thinks more and more of the way Tom Gordon points up to the sky each time he wins a game. What is he pointing at, and why? These questions are the mere beginning of what becomes a spiritual awakening in Trisha's young mind.

Trisha is lost in the woods of Maine for seven days before finally stumbling upon a road. Not even a road, really, but a mere suggestion of what used to be a road. It is a glimmer of hope. For seven days she has lived on nuts and berries and muddy water. For seven nights she has slept out in the cold with nothing but pine boughs for a cover. Trisha is sick and weak and hungry. The road may finally lead her out of the woods. All that is left for her to do is make a simple decision: left or right.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is fast becoming one of my favorite Stephen King audiobooks. While not quite as moving as The Green Mile, there is a certain amount of spirituality going on here that is not entirely common in Stephen King's audiobooks.

Stephen King can make you care about a fictional character like no other author. No matter how many times I read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I still find myself cheering for Trisha McFarland. When King points out how close she was to civilization without even knowing it, if only she had turned right instead of left, it just makes my heart sink. His grasp of human nature is really amazing.

Anne Heche is, of course, a well-known actress, appearing in such movies as "Volcano", "John Q", and "Wag the Dog." She's not a bad audiobook narrator, but she's not great either. What she lacks in passion, she makes up for in enthusiasm. Kind of like her acting now that I think about it.

Even if you are not a fan of Stephen King's audiobooks, you should really give The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon a try. King goes a little deeper with this one than he normally does. I think you'll like it.

I’m getting back to my roots – back in Junior High I took interest in reading through Stephen King, Isaac Asimov and Dean Koontz. Since graduating I have read little of their titles since, so am currently attacking King’s back catalogue – maybe to recapture my youth, but definitely reliving the fun I had when reading. ‘The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon’ was a great addition to my collection and a welcome distraction to many of the YA titles I’ve been reading of late.

I really liked the play of perception and the POV of Trisha (Patricia) our protagonist, lending the interpretation of the story open to the reader to draw her or his own conclusions.

Trisha has an indomitable spirit. I was really cheering for her and amazed at how she faced each challenge.

Tom Gordon, the form of Trisha’s guardian angel, or inner strength was a great symbol to focus on. Though some of the baseball jargon got a little tiresome for me because I loath baseball – it’s not really a big thing here in Australia – I appreciated it for what it was. A distraction and a coping mechanism to get Trisha from point A to point B.

Our antagonist could fall under many forms – nature, fear fuelled imagination, her family; and I loved how it morphed from one to the other, never leaving you certain of anything.

It took half the book to wind up and get interesting. I find every now and then Stephen Kings’s books do get a bit waffly in setting up the story and exploring the casts back stories. I know it is to get us to care about the characters and offer some perspective, but sometimes it feels a little long winded.

‘The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon’ had the right amount of suspense and hair-raising creepiness. The second half of the novel was absolutely brilliant and I could not put it down.

I enjoyed this a lot more than many other of Kings titles, because it was based on character development and an inner struggle rather than gory monsters and demons (though this could be argued). It was a psychological thriller instead of horror, and appealed to my survival instincts. I have found myself lost in the bush many times, having to trek a day or so to safety. It was so vivid, and the descriptions of the landscape - mysterious and beautiful at the same time. Nature can be astoundingly picturesque and the face of death at the same time.

A great read that induces chills and makes you want to pull your feet up off the floor, with the hint of the disgusting and the unknown. Totally recommending this to all my friends who like a scare, but don’t want to feel like tossing up their dinner from gore.

I'm not a baseball fan. In addition, I don't like horror books. So why would I want to read a book where baseball plays a prominent role by the King of horror writers? Well, for one thing, I spent a few years in Maine and in Boston. This book takes place in the woods of Maine. Trisha, a 9-year-old girl, is hiking for a few hours with her mother and brother on the Appalachian Trail in western Maine. The other 2 are arguing, so Trisha lags behind them a bit, then goes off the trail a bit so she can pee. She tries to take a shortcut back to the trail, but winds up lost. This is basically a one-character book. Trisha is lost in the woods and there"s no one else around. There are other characters in the book, such as family and searchers, but they get only a few pages. Trisha is the one you follow throughout almost the entire story. But there is another character. He is Tom Gordon, Trisha's hero, a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. Lost in the woods, with no people around, Trisha listens to Red Sox games on her Walkman so that she can have at least one contact to humanity. Listening to the games, and later imagining that Tom Gordon is with her in the woods, helps her to stay sane and alive while searching for civilization. One final character is the Something that seems to be following Trisha. This thing has a horror element to it and, in my opinion, distracted from the main story. It would be scary enough for a nine-year-old to be lost in the woods, what with little to eat and biting insects and strange noises in the night, without having to resort to a semi-supernatural creature. There is a powerful confrontation at the conclusion, but I thought it was rather unbelievable and disappointing because something else suddenly pops out to save Trisha, rather than Trisha having to solve the problem herself. I think that if you have lived in New England, especially in Maine, you'll like this book, even if you don't like the "usual" Stephen King books. If you like baseball, especially the Red Sox, you might like this book too. Readers of suspense stories will also appreciate this book.

"She had somehow gotten out of bounds, wandered off the playing field and into a place where the rules she was used to no longer applied." from Stephen King's "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon"

Stephen King's "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" is not like his other macabre books of horror and all things freakish and creepy. There's plenty of creep, but the horror is not supernatural nor alien. It's the horror of the common, and how the ordinary human mind (and body) deal with extraordinary circumstances. 

Nine-year-old Trisha is on a hiking trip with her recently divorced mother and older brother in the Maine woods. She steps off the trail to pee and can't find her way back. With a backpack full of picnic food, and a portable radio, Trisha is alone, lost and wandering. King's story is about Trisha's survival, which includes time spent with Tom Gordon, ace closer for her beloved Boston Red Sox.

"...there were teeth hidden in the ordinary texture of things..."

King's language is always precise and exquisitely chosen. In quintessential Stephen King, as Trisha slides down a hill, she imagines herself..."screaming and waving her arms as she went down; saw a dead branch punching through the under-shelf of her jaw and up between her teeth, tacking her tongue to the roof of her mouth like a red memo, then spearing into her brain and killing her."

Some dangers she faces are real, while others are imaginary. Though it only barely makes a difference as the length of her wanderings stretches into days. "Her giving way to panic wasn't sudden...but weirdly gradual, a drawing in from the world, a shutting down of ouert awareness. She walked faster without minding her way; called for help without hearing her own voice; listened with ears that might not have heard a returning shout from behind the nearest tree. And when she began to run she did it without realizing."

"The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" is a short novel at only a shade over 250 pages. As with all of King's work, it's an engaging and fast read. Unlike most of King's work, I didn't find this story quite as rich and vibrant, nor his treatment of Tisha as poignant nor affecting as usual. 

King threads Tom Gordon into the story through Tisha's spurious connection to the outside world through the BoSox games she listens to on her radio (with ever-dwindling batteries), and spectral appearances he makes to her throughout her meandering journey through the woods. There's one surprisingly emotional moment as she listens to the BoSox on the radio and hears her idol battle the hated Yankees in the ninth inning.

"She was lost but would be found. She was sure of it. Tom Gordon had gotten the save and so would she."

Stephen king is a great writer and has proven time and time again to be a talented storyteller. However, most authors publish a few duds, and Mr. King is no exception. The girl who loved Tom Gordon is one of them. It's about a girl who wanders off of the trail for a bathroom break after losing patience with her mother and brother's bickering. She gets lost in the woods. What should have been a gripping, compelling psychological horror novel about a girl's fight to survive the wilderness as well as her own deteriorating sanity turned out to be a bland, generic survival story mixed with a campy, awkward pre-teen girl's celebrity fantasy.

The story is very tedious and predictable. Our main character, Trisha, makes a rest stop only to realize that she can't seem to find the trail. She falls down an embarkment and wanders further into the woods and becomes hopelessly lost. Why she never tried to go back the way she came is beyond me. The majority of this book consists of Trisha wandering around the forest and dealing with the elements, rinse and repeat for every chapter. The book recycles the same imagery, descriptions, and emotions over and over again. This got old quickly and fell flat. What passes as horror in this story is mother nature shaking Trisha down like she owes her money, as well as several gross-out scenes thrown in for good measure. There are a few creepy moments, but that's pretty much it as far as scares. As her situation worsens, she imagines that her athlete crush Tom Gordon is there for moral support and to keep her company. It just feels dumb and awkward.

The book is also littered with filler. For example, the author decided to give Trisha divorced parents. This could have easily been omitted without affecting the main storyline. There were several scenes that took place before, during, and after the parent's divorce. It also contained backstory about Trisha's personal life, as well as several annoying radio jingles. There are also several mentions of her annoying parents and petulant brother, but for the most part the author expects Trisha to carry the story on her own. As I read this book, I became more and more convinced that Stephen just threw a bunch of ideas at the wall, decided to go with all of them, and started writing.

During the second half of the story, Trisha becomes increasingly convinced that an evil entity known as the God of the lost is stalking her. By this point, I was forcing myself to keep reading because I kept waiting for an in-your-face scary scene and hoping that the author could stick the landing. No such luck. The second half was just more wandering through the woods, more gross-out scenes, and more celebrity fantasy. Part of the idea of this story is that neither Trisha nor the readers know whether the entity following her is real or simply a product of her imagination. After more lame filler, the ending just butchers this idea as well as any supernatural element this book had.

To be fair, I honestly found myself rooting for Trisha to the point that I wish I could have helped her. It's other saving grace was that it is mercifully short. That being said, this book was painfully dull. It would have worked better as a short story for part of a collection, had it only been trimmed down considerably and had the scare factor amped up.

This book had a good idea that was poorly executed. The lack of suspense, repetitive descriptions, and generally boring tone make this one to skip.