Book Review: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

A girl gets lost in the woods and begins to lose hope of getting out alive. She listens to the baseball on her Walkman, creating an imaginary friendship with Tom Gordon. As she struggles to survive she realizes that something is watching her.

Title: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Author: Stephen King
My Edition: I borrowed a paperback published by Hodder & Stoughton, published in 2011, but first published in 1999. The book contains 223 pages.
Age: Adult, but I would say anywhere from 16+ maybe.
Genres: Horror, Thriller

Ida’s review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon can be read here.

WHY THIS BOOK
This was a book that Ida told me was the perfect first-Stephen King-book I had to read. So, when there was this read-along on instagram I kind of just thought, WHY NOT.

PLOT / CHARACTERS

I really liked the plot, it’s so simple, but yet so scary. Patricia is on a hike with her mom and her brother when she wanders off the trail to go pee, but when she tries to find the path again she realizes she’s lost. So, she starts to wander, hoping that she’ll find her mother and brother eventually. Patricia is nine years old, so, she’s pretty young walking around alone in the woods. But she’s so incredibly smart.

When Trisha walks around in the woods, a series of things happen to her and I felt like the lines between real and not real was kind of blurred out. We don’t know if Trisha sees things, or if they really happen. I’ve been told that Stephen King is the master of putting supernatural things in his books in a way where you don’t really know if it’s supernatural or not. So this book is pretty much one of those books where your opinion on what happens, is what happens. But the opinion of someone else can be entirely different. I had a hard time deciding what I thought happened, and if this made the book better or worse? I have no idea, not yet. I can’t seem to decide whether or not I thought the book was incredibly good or incredibly weird. I guess it’s the psychological horror that kind of creeped up on me throughout this book. The thing that followed her made this book a little more “real”, and it gave it that little edge that I needed to find the book good.

WRITING

This was where the book kind of came to a halt for me. While I really enjoy Stephen King’s writing in all its glory, it’s descriptive and informational, it was also hard thinking that Trisha was 9 years old. It’s not that I can’t see it, but I felt like some of the things Trisha said weren’t normal for a kid to say. She didn’t cuss, which is fine, but the words she used were strange and weird, and all though they sometimes made Trisha more quirky, they also made it harder to visualize the 9-year-old.

THE ENDING

I felt like the ending was a comfortable ending, like King wanted this to be a story with a nice ending? Like I didn’t like the ending, but I also liked it, and it’s incredibly hard to explain why this is without spilling the entire ending to you, but let’s just say that it was too simple for me.

ALL OVER

Like all books I end up comparing them to other things I’ve read, what I generally like, what scares me, what makes a book really good, and all though this book had some of those important parts for me, it also faulted in several. While I understand the psychological horror of this book, I didn’t find it scary. Which I really wanted it to be, I wanted to be scared, but I wasn’t. I liked Trisha, and I liked the fact that Stephen King draws in so many topics that are scary and hard to talk about (like God and his presence in our lives) and that made the book interesting, but it also makes the book kind of strange. I really wanted to like it, I really did, and I guess that I was kind of scared to at all talk bad about Stephen King because he’s a God himself, and so many people love his work – but I like to think that this was my first Stephen King book, and I see why people like him!

GOODREADS
Page 3 / 1% “”The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted””
Page 111 / 49% “hmmm”
Page 141 / 63% “whaaaaat the fffff”
Page 174 / 78% “I’m seriously not sure if any of my theories are right.. who are the special thing? what is it with tom gordon? and why are the chapters named after baseball-stuff?”
Page 188 / 84% “IS SHE GETTING OUT?”
Page 192 / 86% “WHY IS IT DOING THIS”
Page 196 / 87% “WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS THE BLACK THING”
Page 203 / 91% “poor girl </3”
Page 206 / 92% “:O”
Page 215 / 96% “:O”

Favorite quote: “The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.”