The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

By Stephen King

Review by TC

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a novel by Stephen King.

Probably one of the shortest novels by Stephen King that I've ever read. Two hundred and twenty five pages in the hardcover edition is a lot less that we are used to, but King manages to do, what he set out to do, in those pages and he does it well. Trisha is a young girl who gets lost in the woods and this book tells her story as she struggles to survive. And yes, Trisha loves Tom Gordon who is a baseball player and luckily Trisha has brought her walkman and even more luckily the walkman has a radio and Trisha is able to listen to the baseball games before she goes to sleep.

I have two small problems with this story. The first one is baseball, which isn't exactly the national sport here in Denmark, and even if it where I probably wouldn't know much about it anyway (I don't watch sports). The parts that where about baseball where totally lost on me, except that I understood who won and who lost. Where isn't that much of it, and it isn't that important to the story and anyway it isn't King fault that I know nothing about his favourite sport.

The second problem is more of a wish than a problem. Trisha's story is so well written that the "lost in the woods" plot would have been enough to drive the story and tell the tale that King tells so well (the coming-of-age story). But King just has to add a bit of the supernatural to the story, which is fine and works well in a lot of his books, but it isn't necessary in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and it doesn't add anything that a more down to earth menace would have.

Written on 2nd November 1999 by TC .

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

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