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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Oops!
Review: It is a good book but certainly not "hot horror" as categorized above.Unfortunately, I fear there will be people who choose not to read this book as a result of its headline here.As avid King readers know, some of his books simply do not fit the stereotype that exists in many minds. This is one of those books.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: I'm glad she made it out, because I didn't.
Review: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was good, but not great. I was looking for more and didn't get it. In any Stephen King novel, there is a bit of the supernatural that drives the book forward. I didn't get it here, so I was let down. However, it was still a good book and recommended for those looking for a safe read.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good read for the pool, but not much substance
Review: This was definitely not King's greatest work. As a mother of an almost-9-year-old, I found King's description of Trisha's thoughts too far off base. Additionally, I didn't buy that a 9-year-old would do the things King has her doing. Nevertheless, I was intrigued with finding out how it ended.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Review: I am far from being a Stephen King fan, but I must say that he is a masterful writer in this work. The girl is lost in the woods after a truly beleivable sequence of events where she got separated from her mother and other members of her party. King places you side-by-side with this girl, wise in the ways of the woods, in many respects. You walk with her. You sense her mounting apprehension. You come to rely on hearing how Tom Gordon is doing. The reader must marvel at her tenacity and staying power. King takes you right up to the end, arm-in-arm with the girl.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good!
Review: I am a big fan of Stephen King movies, but I haven't read much of his novels. This is only the second novel by him that I have read. I found it a very simple and very exciting novel. It's about a girl who gets lost in a forest, but she realizes she is not alone. It's very excellent and it will take you only a day to read it.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Very disappointed
Review: As a rule I love Stephen King...but not this time. This book started out slow but I kept reading hoping the plot would pick up but it never happened. If anyone besides Stephen King would have written this I would have given up and not bothered to finish it. If I didn't know better I would think someone else had written this one!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Better to read it than to listen to it!
Review: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is certainly not one of Stephen King's best works, but based on what he has done over the past decade it looks like he is on the comeback trail. I think it's safe to say that this is more of a young adult novel than traditional King horror-fiction, so that is how I am basing my review. It is certainly a satisfying chiller to the graduates of the Goosebumps books, and provides a decent introduction into the world that Stephen King can create.

Most of the traditional King elements are present, and the ones that are left out are a very welcome deletion. King still posesses great ability in making the reader feel as if they are actually part of the setting. Also present is his amazing way of bringing the characters of his stories to life, and he flaunts that power to the maximum in this story, giving life to inanimate objects with stunning clarity. Of course King's traditional flop ending is included, but it nose-dives more graciously than in his previous works. It is one of King's most unusual trademarks, and I wonder if he just lacks the ability to end a story in a way that doesn't make the reader want to skip ahead to the epiplogue. What is missing in Girl, thankfully, is every trace of King's recent delves into perversion that seemed a mainstay only a few years ago (i.e. The Library Policeman, The Regulators, etc.). Overall this is a very good story that can attract suspense fans as well as horror fans.

I am reviewing the audiobook version of this story, however, and that portion of it was simply torture. I don't know who liked Anne Heche's voice enough to give her this reading, but it might has well have been Fran Drescher for all I could stand. At some points I honestly feared that my ears would start bleeding. Heche's screams for "help" were so loud and so frequent that I felt totally embarrassed, thinking that everyone within a block from me could hear it through my headphones and wonder what the hell that noise was. It certainly took away from my enjoyment of the story, but I have the decency enough to base my rating on King's work and not Heche's. Ugh. Recommended read, but stay away from the audiobook (unless you listen to it through a pillow).

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The man who love the girl who loved tom gordon
Review: Actually 4.5 stars. This is King nearly at his best. For any other author it would be a 5 star, but I know what King is capable of. He does a wonderful job making you feel the tension and fear this little girl is feeling. This is work is tight and focused (not an extra word that isn't needed, which to be honest was one of things King has seemed to have trouble with.) This along with his other recent works reaffirms him as a master of storyteller. Pick it up, I doubt you'll be disappointed

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Tepid Fast Food
Review: Some of Stephen King's best stories have featured young(ish) children as protagonists or main characters - we offer "Firestarter", "It", "The Shining" and especially "The Body" as evidence. Time and again, Mr. King has demonstrated an uncanny ability to tap into the minds and emotions of the children we all once were and recreate those magical years for us to live, fear and enjoy again. Unfortunately, "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" doesn't fall into this category; many of the book's problems could have been solved merely by aging our heroine.

As offered, "The Girl" asks readers to suspend their disbelief that a 9-year-old city girl could survive while roaming the southwestern Maine woods for more than a week, a feat that most adults would be unable to accomplish. Moreover, this young girl (named Trisha) possesses a self-awareness and presence of mind - demonstrated by the book's near continuous internal monologue - that elude most people twice her age; note the sensitivity to the subtle differences between definitions of "God" and what her father (i.e., Mr. King in a rare personal appearance) calls the "Subaudible". Finally, Trisha has an attachment to Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon (not the "real" Tom Gordon, Mr. King assures us in a book-extending author's postscript) that is, frankly, unnatural for a prepubescent young girl. Put these qualities into a 13-year-old character, shorten the length of her trek by several days and two-score miles, and the reader might be able to accept the premise.

"The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" could have benefited from more of Mr. King's attention in other areas as well. Instead, he relies on his old standbys, the supernatural and delirium. When Trisha first hears unexpected sounds and experiences a sense of being watched, habitual readers of Mr. King's fiction know that a monster is in the making (though few students of his prose expect him to break one of his fundamental rules and actually show it to us). When the girl is first visited by visions of her friends and Tom Gordon, we can guess that one of these phantoms will guide her to her ultimate fate. By concentrating on the claustrophobic effect of being lost in a vast forest and eliminating the unexplainable, Mr. King could have created a scary story of what happens inside the mind and soul of one so horribly lost. Change the protagonist again - now use a 33- or 43-year-old woman experiencing typical but stressful life changes - and we might have a truly terrifying and universal examination of our age.

Instead, Mr. King gives us what he has always promised, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac & fries. For this consistency if nothing else, we suppose, we can be thankful.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: It isn't horror, and that's good
Review: 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.


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