The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
I very much enjoyed this story about a nine 'but big for her age' year-old girl who gets lost in the Maine wilderness. For the most part. So let's get down to it. What I liked: The girl who loved baseball. Yep, that pretty much sums up why I loved this book. I mean, how can you not love a nine-year-old who loves baseball, in large part because she shared it with her absent-through-divorce father. And maybe I'm a little biased because I was a kid who loved basketball, and then baseball, and then football. Yep, I had favorite players, I could recount their stats. I knew who they pitched against, if they had trademark moves, etc. And for sure I could understand why and how baseball was her link to the world, how she listened to the games for solace and sanity and hope, for escape and, well, everything we love about sports as children or adults. And the girl was tough-as-nails but not unrealistically so. I didn't even mind that she cried ALL the time. I mean, not only was it realistic, but it didn't annoy me how, say, reading YA books about girls crying all the time makes me want to throw the book against the wall. No, when Trisha cried, it fit into the story and didn't make her seem like a spoiled whiny brat (sorry, I have a thing against girls who cry a lot in books). Instead of giving up and feeling sorry for herself, our plucky little heroine gets her resourceful butt up and goes on. Which, incidentally, brings me to the next part of my review: what I didn't like so much. First of all...I may have read this wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is how it happens. Girl hiking in woods with family. Girl comes to fork in the road, goes off in the MIDDLE to pee, and gets lost. She tries to slant off to one side to catch up with her family on the trail, taking the short cut. Okay, so maybe the trail winds away somewhere and she wouldn't intersect it that way. So what does she do? She keeps walking. FOR NINE DAYS!!!!! Hello, why not just turn around? She's in the middle of a fork. When she realizes she's lost, if she'd turned around and gone back, she'd have to either run into one of the two trails or come back to the intersection. It's geographically not possible that she wouldn't. Draw a picture if you don't believe me. For such a smart, resourceful kid to not think of something so simple...I don't believe it for a minute. Not for a kid who knows what to eat in the woods better than I do, and I'm an adult who happened to grow up, that's right, IN THE WOODS!The next thing that sort of bothered me was how she got sick from drinking clear pure stream water. That's pretty much a myth. If you drink stream/river water that comes out of a farm where there's runoff from animal dung, maybe. In the middle of a pristine forest? Not so much. I'd buy it if the swamp water, or the puddle water, made her violently ill ie food poisoning, but not the clean water. And the last thing. Yeah, I know, SK points out that this was her first bad decision, to go north towards Canada instead of south when she got to almost civilization. I could see how she'd miss when she was so close. I could see how she didn't hear the town. But who goes north? Come on, she's seen maps, right? She lives in Maine, right? Can anyone name a town north of Maine besides, um, Canada? Can anyone name a town south of Maine? Yeah, that's what I thought. This girl was way too smart to make those mistakes. If she'd been an idiot, I'd buy it. But then, she wouldn't have lived. So I guess my final word would be this: come on, Mr. King. Don't fall back on the same lame old lost-in-the-woods cliches. Your fans expect more. Also, like most of King's almost could-happen books, I didn't need the supernatural stuff. It was hokey. There's plenty of horror in real life, plenty of scary situations for a girl lost in the woods. We really don't need wasp-gods to know it's scary. Really. I like King's supernatural books fine, but some of them, I always think, are more plausible (aka scary) without it. Those elements just ruin the spine tingling "this could REALLY happen" vibe and distract/detract from the suspense. Maybe he just adds it bc he thinks the fans like that? I know I don't need it in every book. Not. At. All. I definitely fell in love with the character in this book, which is one of the things that Stephen King does SO well. I just didn't buy all the circumstances. But overall, it was a satisfying, if not exactly terrifying, story. I'd recommend to younger King fans or those just getting into his work. And YA readers. And people who have gotten or would like to get lost in the woods.
This was my first time reading this book. I know, I'm just as shocked as you are. So why hadn't I, our resident King fanboy, read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon? Well... I was homeless when it was released. That period of my life was the first of three times I would live on the streets. In 1999, I had successfully alienated myself from my immediate family (my mother and sisters; Dad had moved back to California by this time) due to my abuse of drugs and alcohol, and had moved into an apartment with this heroin addict named Jill. Four months later, Jill got herself cleaned up and decided to kick me out. I was replaced by a guy I came to think of as Studhammer McSwingin'-Dick. In reality, his name was Kirk. Kirk was an addict, too, but his drug of choice was weightlifting. I would eventually come to write about Kirk. Some of you know the character of whom I speak.All that is still no excuse for me having not read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I could have very well read it once I got my shit together, but I didn't. For the longest time, I thought it was an internet-exclusive novella, like Mile 81 and UR, and I was waiting for it to be released in a collection. It wasn't until last year (2014), that I realized the damn thing was actually a full-length (albeit short) novel. Am I mad it took me so long to get around to it? Not really.The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is an okay little book written in the vein of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; one of those human-versus-nature books that values life lessons over plot devices. But, in this case, Hemingway's novella is far superior. There's not a whole lot going on in King's book, and the majority of the problems I had with it have to do with the cast. The characters within are some of King's shallowest. Our MC Trisha is a one-note kiddo who's obsessed with real-life baseball player Tom Gordon, a relief pitcher for King's most favoritest bestest team in all the land, the Boston Red Sox. Her brother Pete is your typical whiny-ass teen who prefers Dad to Mom in the world of New Divorce. Mom and Dad are just there; I got no feel for their characters at all. One of the plus sides of the book is something King refers to as Wasp-Priest. What a creepy thing that was. The first time Wasp-Priest is mentioned is some of the creepiest work King's done since Pet Sematary. "The God of the Lost" is a cool name, too, but the reveal at the end of the book was kinda shit. What Trisha ended up facing off with was rad and all, but the way King delivered the reveal was anti-climactic. I literally said, "Fucking really? Dude, you didn't even try." I think King was hoping to rely on the build up he'd created earlier in the book to carry over to the end. Unfortunately, it carried about as well as a sack with a hole in the bottom. Overall, I give The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon a pretty "Meh" rating. It is, without a doubt, mediocre King material. There are far better King books, but there are far shittier ones, too. In fact, two of his shittiest novels are up next on my reread list. Back to back: Dreamcatcher followed by From a Buick 8. I might read Hearts in Atlantis and Nightmares and Dreamscapes in between. Haven't decided yet... Anyway, after From a Buick 8, it's another Decade with King post. Obvious tie-ins:The novel takes place around TR-90, which is the location of of Mike Noonan's vacation home, Sara Laughs (Bag of Bones). This puts The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon inside the Dark Tower universe--guilty by association. Trivia:This is the last book King released before a van ran him down while he was out on his daily walk, almost killing him. King would write about the experience in On Writing and The Dark Tower. Other novels influenced by the accident are Dreamcatcher and Duma Key.In summation: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a highly-readable, mostly actionless novel with cardboard characters and an ending lacking any luster whatsoever. You probably won't regret reading it, but, if you choose to skip it, you won't be missing anything special. Final Judgment: Contains more walking than The Hobbit and the entire The Lord of the Rings saga combined.
What do You think about The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (2005)?
Well, I finally read this book. It took me long enough. And all I can say is Uncle Stevie does it again! He takes a simple scenario and makes you wonder what is real and what isn't? Here you have, 9 year old Tricia McFarland, who's hiking w/ her mom and brother, who loses her way in the woods. Thanks to her spunk, courage and imaginary friend (so to speak) baseball player, Tom Gordon she pushes on. Is she alone in the woods? Or is it just the imagination of a little girl? I wasn't able to put this book down!
—Kathy
This was a tough book to get through. I thought that at worst, I would breeze through this and it would be entertaining for a few days. For some reason, every page was a slog for me. I felt just like the main character, lost in the woods, lost. This is probably one of the harshest reviews I've ever written. Let me try to find some nice things to say:*The book brought back some memories of the late 1990s. *Some parts of the book, I genuinely empathized with the main character's plight. *I applaud Stephen King for pulling back the reigns on the horror aspects of this book, using instead more psychological horror. I have a lot of negative things to say about this book, but mostly I thought that this was the kind of story that would have benefited from either two or three more drafts or being scaled back to a short story. The basic elements for a great book were there, I just thought that the execution was way too obvious.
—Daniel Clausen
I could say that Stephen King “hits a home run” with The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon but that would sound trite and campy.But what the hell.King hits a home run, this is a great book.It’s about a nine year old girl (but big for her age) who gets lost in the woods – and a lot more. This is about fear, deep primal fear that is at the roots of our childhood and never really goes away, just retreats back into a far, dark corner to wait. Most everyone has a memory from childhood when a hand held was suddenly - not held; when a parent was there – and then not there.When a path in the woods was suddenly lost. Everyone has a memory from when they were suddenly alone.King knows better than most any writer today about fear, and here he demonstrates his incredible ability to awake in the reader a deep primal fear that we all can recognize, and what better illustration of that recognition than a little girl lost in the woods?Trisha realizes when she “felt the first winnow flutter of disquiet” that she was lost in the woods, and from there King leads us in an uncomfortable, suspenseful long walk in the woods with a very likable protagonist.Reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood in his brilliant The Willows and especially in The Wendigo, King creates an antagonist in an almost personified menace of “the woods” or “the wild” and finally in a mystic representation of a wild god.And of course – baseball. BRILLIANT! As a baseball fan himself, King plays on the spiritual quality of the game while adopting baseball’s natural rhythm in the novel’s structure. *Tom Gordon really did have a phenomenal season in 1998, an all-star election and 46 saves, finishing 69 games.
—Lyn
