Devouring Stephen King: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

"The world had teeth, and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted."

Ah, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. When you decide to do something stupid like read every single Stephen King book ever, when you've already read quite a few of them, there are bound to be some that you're not really bothered about encountering ever again. Whilst I didn't dread The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon like I do, say, Dreamcatcher (I hate it. I hate it so much. And it's a mere 2 books away.) I still wasn't desperate to read it again, like I am, say, the last three books of The Dark Tower.

Anyway. Enough about me. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is about a girl. Who loves Tom Gordon.

(Tom Gordon being apparently a real life baseball player and zzzzzzz) And who also happens to be walking in the woods with her mum and brother when she goes off the path to pee and gets completely and horribly lost. And she wanders around in the woods for days and stuff happens and there's a really stupid supernatural element aaaaand that's about the whole book.

The thing about The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is, even if you hate it (which I don't! I just don't particularly like it) it's at least short, so you don't feel like you're about to die of boredom while you're reading it. Having said that, though, it also almost felt too long for what it was- there's only so much you can read about one girl's struggle to survive in the wilderness before you almost don't care anymore. In some ways this book reminded me of The Body (which was also Stand by Me) only with more peril, and I felt like it would also have benefitted from being novella-length, rather than a full sized novel.

But. The main character is a girl!

Now, I actually think King has a fairly good track record with his representation of women (if I didn't think that, I don't think I would have been able to keep reading him for so long) but it's a rare thing where his main character (and in this book, Trisha is basically the only character) is a girl, and even rarer when that girl isn't a victim of some kind of abuse. Better than that though, Trisha is sort of awesome- she's a nine year old who manages to forage in the woods for food, escape insect attacks, and walk into a whole other State to try and find her own way out. Not bad for a girl, huh?

She's also a girl who loves baseball, which makes me partially want to go 'Yessssss, girls like sports too!' but in reality it was more like 'ughhhhh, baseball' because I don't really enjoy reading about a sport that firstly, I don't really understand because it's not something we have in the UK, but also that what I do understand I find kind of boring? The point is, this is something King often includes in his books, and it's never going to be something I find very interesting, although I understand why he does it and I'm not going to scold him for it. I'll just continue to yawn my way through those parts.

So, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. It's fine, but it doesn't set my world on fire. If you were the kind of child whose nightmares were centred on being lost in the woods, then this will probably scare the bejeesus out of you, but I'm from England and there probably aren't even any woods here you couldn't find your way out of in, say, a day. Which, incidentally, is about as long as it'll take to finish this book, ensuring that you don't waste too much of your time on it. Which isn't something I'd recommend.