ISBN: 9781444707472
Date read: 14/06/2021
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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‘The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. At ten o’clock on a morning in early June she was sitting in the back seat of her mother’s Dodge Caravan, wearing her blue Red Sox batting jersey (the one with 36 Gordon on the back) and playing with Mona, her doll. At ten thirty she was lost in the woods.’[1]
I feel that this short quote explains the premise of this story better than I ever could. The prose in this novel is some of King’s most polished, and at a slim 226 pages, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon flies by in a feverish blur of bugs, dirt, darkness and humidity. The pace of the novel is so streamlined that most readers will finish it in only one or two sittings, and the real-time narrative seems to encourage this. Seasoned Stephen King fans will be right at home with this novel, and likely devour it with delight, so this review is more aimed at anyone who has yet to read a King.
As with most of his fiction, the world of the novel is extremely grounded in the real world, with mentions of people, places, music and movies helping to conjure a vivid and tangible vision of contemporary New England, which will be very familiar to King fans, as will be the themes of childhood’s end and youthful adventure leading to confrontations with the sad realities of adult life and even death, elements seen previously in his story The Body and his novel IT.
There are some truly heart-wrenching scenes, where King reminds us that the brave and plucky Trisha, while proving herself to be intelligent and capable, is still a nine-year-old girl, and it is almost painful to read when she finally reaches breaking point, ‘I want my mother, I want my brother, I want my dolly, I want to go home!’[2] Reading scenes like this lay a gut-wrenching layer of fear on us readers, who are privy to the dramatic irony of King telling us that the search parties and helicopters are looking for Trisha in the wrong place, as she takes a wrong turn and unknowingly makes her way out of Maine entirely, moving into New Hampshire, and even beyond.
Another aspect of the story that the novel benefits from is that its setting, and the peril Trisha finds there, feels very real. Despite taking place in King’s shared universe[3], (Mr. King was linking his books together decades before the Marvel films) there is (mostly) an absence of a strong supernatural element, like a shape-shifting killer clown or a murderous Cadillac that drives itself, and King is able to turn his storytelling mastery to far more tangible terrors, making this one of his most tense and chilling books, where the novel’s threats and dangers could befall any of its readers or their loved ones:
‘Life could be very sad, it seemed to her, and mostly it was what it could be. People made believe that it wasn’t, and they lied to their kids (no movie or television program she had ever seen had prepared her for losing her balance and plopping back in her own crap, for instance) so as not to scare them or bum them out, but yeah, it could be sad.’[4]
The only element of the story that personally didn’t work for me was the implications that, on top of the threat to human survival from sickness and starvation, Trisha is being stalked by some sort of unknown creature, which is finally revealed at the end. I felt that this plot element was unnecessary, and actually took away from the far more tangible and thrilling battle for survival undertaken by a little girl lost in the woods. At the novel’s close, however, I can certainly see how this plot element serves to draw a line under the major themes of the novel and it doesn’t detract from the story in any major way, so this may be down to personal taste more than anything.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a modern fable, a bedtime story for grown-ups, where the fortitude of the story’s young heroine is tested to the extreme, where truly horrible things happen to an innocent child and every life-threatening situation that befalls her is followed closely by another, and the reader has no choice but to embark on this journey with her, desperately turning the pages to see if Trisha McFarland will make it out of the woods alive.
[1] Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, (London; Hodder: 2007) p.3
[2] Ibid, p.167
[3] There is a mention in the book of the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine, which appears in eighteen of King’s stories.
[4] Ibid, p.139