Book Review: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon follows Trisha - the titular girl - as she wanders off a hiking path and finds herself lost in the woods after attempting a shortcut and falling down an embankment.  While lost, she believes herself pursued by the malevolent God of the Lost - which may or may not be a hallucination - as she tries to find her way back to civilization.

Right out the gate, this is a promising premise for King to tackle , but in customary King style, he adds to it beautifully and both uses and subverts the tropes of this well-worn story type to explore self-reliance, loneliness, and wonder.

This is a shorter King novel - only 219 pages - but he uses each page wisely: Almost the entirety of it is focused on Trisha, with only a few bits here and there to let the reader know what is happening with her family and explaining how the search is going.  This allows King to really delve into her thoughts and feelings in a way that many of his other novels - with their large casts and multiple subplots - cannot hope to.

And Trisha is a great character.  While King definitely struggled with his women and girl characters in his earlier works, Trisha doesn't have any of those issues.  He manages to credibly make her self-reliant while still maintaining her childishness (Trisha is 9 years old).  This allows him to grow the character in interesting ways as she is forced to survive, and helps with the ambiguity of the supernatural events she may or may not be experiencing.

The supernatural aspects - though sparse - are also well done, especially since King never lets the reader know for certain if Trisha is truly experiencing them or hallucinating due to malnutrition and sickness.  Her first experience with it reads as both a dream and reality, and it is a harrowing read even if you do ultimately come down on the side of it being her imagination.

While this isn't listed as one of King's best novels - and, indeed, I'm not quite sure where I would rank it out of his 70+ books - I do think it might be one of his more underrated ones.  Whether because of its simplicity or because it found itself released between two more prominent of his novels (Bag of Bones and Hearts in Atlantis), I think it is often overlooked.  Which is a shame, because I would definitely recommend it - especially for first-time King readers.

4 out of 5

Stats:

Pages: 219

Movie?: None yet, though one is supposedly in the works with Lynne Ramsay set to direct
Dark Tower?: Like Carrie, this is the rare King novel that has no obvious connection to the Dark Tower

Child Deaths?: None, though this isn't surprising given the small cast