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Summary: King shows why he is the king
Review: One year has passed since none-year old Trisha McFarland's parents divorced. Her mother gained prime custody of Trisha and her older brother Pete. The trio left the Boston suburb of Malden to live in Maine. Pete misses his old life and is always fighting with their mother. On those weekends in which the two children do not stay with their father in Boston, their mother takes them on field trips. Today, they begin the six-mile hike along the Appalachian trail. As Pete and their mom argue, Trisha stops to go to the bathroom. When she finishes, the little girl realizes she is separated from her companions. Over the next nine days she struggles to survive against an unknown enemy who has left many dead animals in his wake. For salvation, Trisha turns to her imagination and her hero, Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon, to help guide her through the nightmarish woods and her unknown foe. However, the odds of a pre-teen surviving this ordeal is almost as great as the Red Sox finally overcoming the curse of Babe Ruth. THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON is Stephen King at his most frightening best. No one blends real world and nightmare better than Mr. King and with this novel he does that very well. The story line, which moves along like an exciting nine inning baseball game, is filled with real life elements such as Tom Gordon being the prime stopper for the Sox. The terror felt by Trisha also seems genuine. As these elements combine into a fabulous plot, couch potatoes have a one sitting treat that takes them along the Appalachian Trail. <P<Harriet Klausner
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Summary: I Loved "The Girl who loved tom gordon!!!"
Review: Excellent with the most surreal teror and realistic power of King's words that bring terrifying images on ink and paper by using the forest as a setting.
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Summary: King Hits Another One Outta the Park!
Review: All of a sudden, the mother and brother walking through the path in the woods stop fighting. The brother looks back, and doesn't see his nine-year-old sister Trisha, who was supposed to be following behind. Where is she? Where could she have gone? This is Opening Day of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the new Stephen King novel about faith, and perserverance, and baseball. Little Trisha McFarland, purely by accident, gets lost in the Maine woods after seperating herself from her family. What begins as a family outing one early Saturday morning becomes a long, dark journey for this little girl, one whose outcome is always uncertain. For Trisha may not be alone in the woods ... and whatever is out there may be hungry. The bulk of this short novel deals primarily with Trisha's lonesome journey deeper and deeper into the heart of the woods. One is often reminded of a similar journey by Jack Sawyer in the earlier book The Talisman, but Jack had the backdrop of America to rely on. Here, Trisha has only her wits, her rudimentary knowledge of the woods, and her Walkman, which broadcasts Red Sox baseball games, featuring her favorite player, Tom Gordon. The games become sort of a lifeline for her, a way to connect with the world of lights and people as she moves further and further away from that world. To keep her company, she imagines Gordon is with her at times, talking to her and generally keeping her sane. As the actual broadcasts begin to fade out, she relies more and more on her make-believe Tom Gordon, who speaks to her philosophically, and has faith in a saving God. Trisha herself begins to lose faith in Tom Gordon's God. She has to contend with mosquitoes, wasps, water that makes her sick, a dwindling food supply, encroaching lonliness and a series of darker and darker hallucinations. In the midst of all these trials, she senses something, a God of the Lost, stalking her as prey, following her on her dark journey. This God becomes more real when she finds angry slash-marks on the trees in her path ... and severed heads of animals seemingly left specifically for her to see. Whether or not The God of the Lost is real becomes the true focus of the novel, and the issue of faith has never been more subtly presented. At every turn, Trisha is knocked down, but she gets up again (it's no mistake that Chumbawumba is the tape left in her Walkman), and it becomes fascinating to watch this little girl survive. At times, her adventure becomes disheartening (a trip through a boggy swamp is especially upsetting) but as Trisha puts more faith in Tom Gordon, we put more faith in her. Every time Gordon makes a save for the Red Sox, he gestures briefly toward the sky, an acknowledgement of his trust in God. We sweat out the pages of this book that bares his name to see if Trisha will make her own save. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is one of the most tense and scary books Stephen King has ever written. The writing is crisp and clear, and he doesn't seem to have time to go into much exposition. He tells us what we need to know, and moves on. This is no long, flowing narrative; here, the pages whiz by in a flash, perpetuated by the need to know if Trisha will ever get out of the woods, and what the God of the Lost truly is. If ever King wrote a book with "the gotta" in mind, this is it. Intense, dark, and short enough to be read in one sitting, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is ultimately one of King's most satisfying novels. God may not love the Red Sox, but to Stephen King fans, He's been pretty fair. Play ball!
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Summary: Providence Journal Bulletin review
Review: 3.5.99 00:03:07 RED SOX NOTEBOOK Oh the horror! Gordon is savior of King book By SEAN McADAM and STEVEN KRASNER Journal Sports Writers FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Best-selling horror novelist and lifelong Red Sox fan Stephen King visited City of Palms Stadium yesterday for the team's exhibition opener agains the Minnesota Twins. King has just completed his latest book, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon , which is scheduled to be published in the first week of April. The book tells the story of a young girl who gets lost in the woods of Maine, and finds her way by listening to Red Sox broadcasts on the radio. Tom Gordon is the little girl's favorite player. King said he came up with the idea of using Gordon as a central character because he was ``fascinated with the act of thanking God for the save,'' as Gordon routinely does by pointing toward the sky after the final out. ``When you're lost in the woods,'' said King, ``you're looking to be saved. This is Hansel and Gretel without Hansel.'' King also hoped to meet with Minnesota Twins pitching prospect Matt Kinney yesterday. Kinney, like King, is a native of Bangor, Maine. He was dealt by the Red Sox to the Twins last year in the deal for Orlando Merced and Greg Swindell.
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Summary: this book is gonna be great, the next one, too.
Review: ''The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon'' is a 224-page reader in which the main character is a 9-year-old girl who gets lost in the back woods of Maine. She copes with the situation by listening to Sox radio broadcasts (Joe Castiglione can be very soothing if you are lost in the wilderness). Gordon is her make-believe friend." Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe, 02/20/99. © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
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Summary: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Review: Stephen King's "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" is an attention-grabbing read that keeps you on your toes. The spine-chilling suspense keeps the pages turning. Trisha, the main character in the novel, is a nine year old girl who constantly drifts off into her own world where the consistent fighting between her brother Pete and her newly-divorced mother seems to disappear. One Saturday, while on an innocent walk with her family, Trisha drifts off and becomes separated from her mother and brother. What happens to her in the following days is enough to keep the suspense alive. A main issue in the story is that of Trisha feeling alone. Her father was an alcoholic and she has always felt so separated from everyone else in her family. Reading this made me think about what it would be like to be alone, and feel so isolated from everyone else. King uses a great amount of detail in describing events and occurances in the novel, and it makes the story behind all of the description, all the more interesting. This novel is excellent for readers who enjoy suspense and frightening excitement. I loved reading this book and I very highly recommend it.
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Summary: A page turner
Review: I enjoyed every word of this book. It was the perfect post Christmas book for me. I always enjoy Stephen King's works. I'm honestly suprised that I haven't read more of his books and short stories than I have.
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Summary: Fast Paced Look At the Mettle of a Nine Year Old
Review: I picked up Stephen King's "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" to see how well the author's work hewed to the writing advice he gives in "On Writing." Pretty well, it turns out. As a bonus, I liked this story. The simple premise revolves around a nine year old lost in a huge woods with only her wits and a few supplies to sustain her. Her wits devolve upon Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon, her favorite player, whose image accompanies her. The imagined Gordon provides the inner voice she needs to meet the challenges of the deep woods and her own mind. Of course, there also lurks the unknown terror at the edge of the wood, but from King's reputation I assume that this nemesis provides much less horror than is usually found in his more famous works. Rather, the unknown terror provides suspense and a motivating force that this child must deal with. More would give away the crux of the story. Suffice to say the reader won't be disappointed by the end of the book. Simple, but King's excellent writing sustains this simple premise over two hundred and fifty odd pages. His character development is wonderful -- one feels the little girl's (Trisha)emotions as she confronts her trials. His dialogue (in flashbacks) feels real and the whole story is believable. This book works and is an excellent quick read.
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Summary: Proof (if any were needed) that Stephen King can WRITE......
Review: Wow. I haven't been so impressed with a Stephen King novel in years - not since "Salem's Lot", and he wrote that back in the 70's. I'm impressed with this for far different reasons, of course. "Salem's Lot" was a pure horror novel - a small town in Maine is visited by a vampire. "Tom Gordon", by contrast, deals with a totally different kind of horror. No vampires, werewolves, or any of the other creatures King's dark imagination has come up with in his other novels. No, this horror is something that everyone can identify with in one form or another - the horror that occurs when a child turns up missing. King deals mostly with the child's point of view here - what happens to that child when she loses her way, to put it euphemistically. In this case, Trisha McFarland's imagination simply runs wild. She imagines good things - her conversations with Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon, for example - and bad things - the "thing" that is following her throughout her journey. I won't spoil the resolution of that particular part of the story, except to say that it has a happy ending. And I actually cried when I got to the end of this book - something I never dreamed I'd do for a Stephen King novel. Oh, it's not perfect - but it's a damn sight better than a lot of what King has written over the last few years. And because of the kind of horror it deals with, it's also one of his most frightening books ever.
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Summary: stephen kings"the little girl who loved tom gordon
Review: Trisha is a 9 year old girl while on a hike with her mother and brother somehow gets lost in the woods. Whole trying to find her way back to civilization Trisha encounters a countless number of strange and unordinary things, such as a dead deer who seems to have died in a very unusual way. Something seems to be stocking this young girl in the woods and being lost doesnt seem like here only problem. This by far was not one of Kings best works, it was far diffrent from his shocking, gorry writing style that most of his books have. The ending of the book was very dissapointing and there were a lot of loose ends that were never really tied up. All and all the basic story and plot wasnt bad, but the ending really ruined the book for me. I would still reccomend this book, but be warned the ending ruins it.
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