Peter and Susan's Website

Interest

Reviews

Blogs

Pics

Fun Stuff

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

I bought this book from Ebay for 99p. I used to be a big fan of Stephen King's books and haven't even read half of them yet so I thought this would be a good place to pick up with them again.

For a Stephen King book this is a very slim volume and I read the book easily in a couple of sessions.

I had imagined that the book would be a love story, going by the title, and had wondered if I would like it as it also mentioned baseball on the dust jacket but it is neither a love story or simply a tale about baseball. I wonder if the book sales suffered because people were put off by the title!

The story is about a nine year old girl whose parents are going through a separation which badly affects her and her elder brother. On a long distance walk through the woods with their mother, her brother and mother start arguing and don't notice the girl drop off the path in order to have a pee. The girl gets lost in the deep woods and struggles to survive with a little food, unsuitable clothing and a Walkman for company. Trisha is intelligent and knows she is in trouble and encounters wasps, mosquitos and dangerous animals and comes close to starvation. To help keep her sanity she invents that she can see her baseball hero by her side, Sox pitcher Tom Gordon, and she speaks to him and believes he is protecting her and uses the batteries in her Walkman sparingly to listen to baseball games.

You would think that, with only one central character, the book would be dull but it's not at all and you are routing for Trisha to survive her ordeal. The book is set, where most of Stephen King's books are set, in Maine in the USA. He obviously has knowledge of just how vast the forests are in this area and has done his homework on what beasts live in it and which plants are edible and which are poisonous.

I have always enjoyed 'adventure' books; be they 'true stories' or 'fiction', and this book was no exception. It also proves that Stephen King doesn't just write 'horror' fiction but can be much subtler than that.