Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic book from a teacher's perspective.
Review: Wow! This is my first Stephen King read and I absolutely loved it! I picked this book up through one of the book orders at STMS in Herculaneum. I really loved this book. King tampers with my emotions enough to make this book a keeper. I think reviewers who were disappointed with this book were avid King readers, and may have anticipated more from him. It's refreshing when an actor can adapt to different roles on the screen, so it is also fantastic that King is able to cater to the needs of varying readers.
Trisha McFarland is a 9 year old girl who is very ordinary in many ways. She is tired of her mother and brother bickering, tired of being ignored, tired of being taken for granted. When she slips out of sight of her family, Trisha soon realizes that she may as well have been forgotten. Lost in the deep forests of Northeastern America, Trisha must rely on her instincts, courage, and imagination to keep her alive.
King practices so many qualities that I look for in an author. His use of description is satisfying. He reminds me so much of Ray Bradbury in his descriptive style. King uses symbollic and imaginative descriptions that stir emotional reactions in the reader making the story very real and personal.
King's ability to balance readers and characters on the narrow line between sanity and insanity is tendered by his use of suspense, and stretching the limits of the hero's endurance. He tests our tolerance for his slow and deliberate taxing of a well designed character. It drives me crazy to think about a ten year old girl surviving many of the things Trisha had to survive.
Finally, King keeps things very real. There is nothing in this story that could not haunt the rest of us forever because of its solubility in reality. I don't think I've read anything more satisfying for a while. Each barrier Trisha faces is believeable. Her mental interpretations of these realities is reasonable even when she starts hallucinating.
I fell in love with Trish McFarland as a character because she is strong, courageous, and creative. She is a fighter and a survivor. She is the kind of girl that inspires me to be a better teacher because she is strong and confident, always looking for ways around obstacles instead of letting them be excuses for her not to learn or improve. Too bad more kids can't be like that.
So why realease such a fantastic book? ... Hey I'm keeping my copy! Eventually I want it hard bound. I'm releasing copies of this one to people who inspire me. It is truly a practical book for a controlled release. I'm excited to read what others have said about this book. I know it must have been a popular title. King has always been a popular author. Now I know why.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" doesn't contain blood, gore, specters or other things one might connect to horror, yet it still manages to intimidate.
King's best quality is his way of making his characters come to live and his ability to create realistic environments. This book is no exception to that. Trisha's feelings are so strongly expressed, her fate so frightening and her strenght so pure, that it creates goose pimples. When I read the book I said to myself that I would never go in the woods again, of course, that feeling faded, but that's how real and scary the book felt when I read it. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is not like King's more typical novels, such as It, Carrie or Christine, but his way of writing is not gone in this book, therefor I don't think you'll be disappointed. A good thing about this book is that everybody can read it, regardless if you're a young teenager or an older adult. The only thing I'm not delighted with is the ending. It feels like it was rushed. Except for that, the book's excellent and I'd highly recomment it.
Rating:
Summary: Stephen King Does It Again
Review: This was the first Stephen King book I read, and I picked it up from my school library as a book report book. The book is about a girl named Trisha McFarland, a 9-year-old girl in Maine. On a hiking trip in the Appalachian Mountains with her Mom and brother, she wanders off the path to get away from her mom and brother who are arguing too much to pay any attention to her. Pretty soon, she finds herself hopelessly lost in the Maine wilderness. Soon, she looks to her walkman radio for a shred of hope for any human contact ever again. She listens to the Red Sox game, especially to her favorite baseball player, Tom Gordon. But soon, her radio fades, and she pretends that Tom Gordon is there with her. It soon becomes clear that he can't protect her from the all too real enemy that has left a trail of slaughtered animals and fallen trees. This is a good book if you like Stephen King, horror stories, or just reading altogether. I highly reccomend it!
Rating: 
Summary: A nature story by Stephen King?
Review: If you are looking for an amazing story filled with suspense and horror steer clear of "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon." Although this was the first story I read by Stephen King, I found it to be lacking in substance and terror from what I've been told about his other books. This is the story of a girl named Trisha Mcfarland and her "troubles". The book starts off telling the reader about the Mcfarland family and how they have gotten a divorce and now Trisha and her brother live with their mother. Their mother decides to take them out on a hike and along the way Trisha decides to wander off the trail and go to the bathroom. Before she knows it her mother and brother are nowhere to be found. The rest of the story is now a long and boring telling of how she wanders yet further from civilization and any hope of ever seeing her family again. King is known for his suspense and terror but this book was more of a nature story. The only part that is even remotely scary is the fact that she thinks something is watching her all along and waiting for the right time to go in for the kill. Throughout the story the reader is made to believe that it is a human following her; but at the end it turns out to be a bear that gets shot by a man that is wandering through the woods. Also what makes this book really boring and actually very weird is her obsession with the baseball player Tom Gordon, as mentioned in the title. When she first gets lost in the woods she is very worried about her Walkman and saving the batteries so she can listen to the games at Fenway Park. She then starts to imagine that Tom Gordon is standing there with her throughout the story. While all this is going on in the woods Trisha's family has gotten a search party out looking for her with helicopters, dogs, and policemen leading the way. King didn't focus on the search for Trisha very much the whole story was all about her walking through the woods trying to find her way home. This book does not live up to the "Stephen King" name. It is boring and lacking in the gore and bloody bodies that all King fans have grown accustomed to. If you are looking for a story to read right before you go to bed that'll make you have sweet dreams and put you to sleep this is the book for you. Otherwise, I would recommend that you read another King book or something with a little more action and suspense.
Rating:
Summary: An attention graber for the non- readers
Review: I read this book in 6th grade. I picked it up and said, "I'll never be able to read this" i was wrong I read it in 2 days. I hated reading until I read that book. He's so descriptive and the words run so smoothley. I highley reccomend this book to people from ages 12- 50
Rating: 
Summary: Good
Review: The girl who loved Tom Gordon is a story about a young girl named Trisha. She goes hiking with her Mom and her brother which argued a lot with each other about a lot of things then wanting to have a break and needing to answer a nature's call Trisha gets seperated from them but she can not find her way back. She's lost in the bush. I am a huge Stephen King fan but this one wasn't what I have expected. OK. At least 95% of the plot was regarding Trisha - it almost seemed that King forgot with whom did she go hiking!
I struggled but I still made it to the last page when Trisha is finally found.
Rating:
Summary: Sleepless nights ahead to finish this great book.
Review: I loved this book, it held my attention fully. I stayed
up late a few nights to finish it because I could not wait
to see how this little girl would finally make out in
finding her way back on the right trail. I would read it
again, every page.
Rating: 
Summary: I was surprized...
Review: I'm not normally a fan of Stephen King - I'll admit it, I'm too wussy for the level of creepiness he can achieve. But a friend told me I had to read this one and in a weak moment I bought it. I was glad I did. It wasn't what I'm used to from other books like IT and Carrie but I loved the story. Our young Trisha gets lost in the woods during a family outing. During her time wandering in the woods, she is starving and tired and eventually starts to hallucinate but keeps going as she tries to find her way out of the woods.
It was a great book with good flow, I was never bored. My only 'negative' comment would be that it was not long enough.
Fan or not, pick this one up!
Rating:
Summary: A very very boring book
Review: I don't recommend it at all
Rating:
Summary: Never quite gels
Review: The young heroine of this story, a young girl lost in a very dank woods, is certainly admirable and strong and courageous, and we root for her. But the obstacles thrown in her path, while certainly dangerous, feel far too mundane to really get our blood racing. And King's fawning use of the Red Sox as a form of salvation and connection for the girl really doesn't work. Maybe if you're a fanatical Sox fan, but even then, I think the device is thin, at best. Once again, as King does from time to time, he takes a perfectly acceptable short-story (or maybe novella) and pads it to book length. He did this with CUJO, but that book had such momentum and drama behind it that we actually enjoyed the unnecessary detail, but it kept us in that world a while longer. But as with GERALD'S GAME or FROM A BUICK 8, TOM GORDON simply feels padded. And this makes it seem a bit tired and uninspired. It's rare to read a King book that feels rote and uninspired, and therefore I feel particularly harsh towards it. He's certainly got enough money without needing to release work that clearly didn't fully fire his imagination. Less is more, on several levels. The only positive to this book, I would say, is that if you have younger kids (like 12-15) and you want to introduce them to King without full immersion in his better, but bloodier and rawer, books, then TOM GORDON might be an okay way to start. But I'd go with EYE OF THE DRAGON, which he wrote with a younger audience in mind. THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON, sadly, is one of the very few Stephen King books I can't recommend.
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