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Audio CD Description Trisha McFarland is a plucky 9-year-old hiking with her brother and mom, who is grimly determined to give the kids a good time on their weekends together. Trisha's mom is recently divorced, and her brother is feuding with her for moving from Boston to small-town Maine, where classmates razz him. Trisha steps off the trail for a pee and a respite from the bickering. And gets lost. Trisha's odyssey succeeds on several levels. King renders her consciousness of increasing peril beautifully, from the "first minnowy flutter of disquiet" in her guts to her into-the-wild tumbles to her descent into hallucinations, the nicest being her beloved Red Sox baseball pitcher Tom Gordon, whose exploits she listens to on her Walkman. The nature writing is accurate, tense, and sometimes lyrical, from the maddening whine of the no-see-um mosquito to the profound obbligato of the "Subaudible" (Trisha's dad's term for nature's intimations of God). Our identification with Trisha deepens as we learn about her loved ones: Dad, a dreamboat whose beer habit could sink him; loving but stubborn Mom; Trisha's best pal, Pepsi Robichaud, vividly evoked by her colorful sayings ("Don't go all GIRLY on me, McFarland!"). The personal associations triggered by a full moon, the running monologue with which she stays sane--we who have been lost in woods will recognize these things. In King's revealing Amazon.com interview, he said the one book he wishes he'd written was Lord of the Flies. When Trisha confronts a vision of buzzing horror in the middle of the woods, King creates his strongest echo yet of the central passage of Golding's novel. --Tim Appelo

Customer Reviews Best King work to date I was shocked to realize this short novel has become my favorite Stephen King work. While it doesn't have the breathtaking scope of The Stand, it could be his most human horror story to date. I don't say this lightly, either--King, in my opinion, is the master of humanizing horror. It's wonderful to see how King's style has evolved over the years. Compare this work to the first book in the Gunslinger saga, and you'll be shocked. While I understand that some might prefer his younger, more edgy tales, I find The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon to be the perfect meeting of the anger and fear of youth and the contentment and satisfaction of proud middle age. A painful read Stephen King has a legion of fans and a reputation that will probably never be surpassed, so I am going to assume that this just wasn't one of his better books. While the synopsis on the jacket sounded both interesting and frightening, the book was neither. It was childishly written (probably meant to capture the spirit of the main character, but quite annoying nonetheless), painfully detailed, and horribly redundant. It was the first Stephen King book I've read, and will likely be the last. This was a total waste of time and money. Should Have Been Much Better Okay, to start with we have Stephen King, a truly gifted horror writer who can squeeze terror out of any situation, even the most mundane. We then have a tried-and-true scary situation; a little girl lost in the woods, with an unseen evil apparently stalking her. This SHOULD have been utterly terrifying. It SHOULD have been gripping, suspenseful and impossible to put down. I SHOULD have found myself unable to sleep after reading it because I was trembling too badly. The problem was, none of this happened. This is a short book for King (only 260 pages) and it seems like a large chunk of it is missing; mainly, the good part. For the first 200 pages, King describes the first week that his little girl hero is lost in the woods. He describes it not only day by day but hour by hour. Over that time, the girl is a little bit scared, a little bit hungry, a little bit uncomfortable, but never shows the level of dismal fear that any 9-year-old girl would actually be showing at this point; King's hero actually talks and acts more like a sassy 13 or 14-year-old, and her inner thoughts are more like those of a bright college kid! Then, after that first 200 pages, King skips ahead by about 4 or 5 days to a point where the hero is finally REALLY tired, REALLY hungry...although still not really scared. She never gets scared, so neither do we. When we finally meet the invisible evil that has been stalking her, the discovery is dull, common, and not only not scary, it's almost silly. I found myself wanting to rewind this book and write my own version, but better! If King had actually described this lost-in-the-woods experience from the viewpoint of a small child, the book would have been gripping and entertaining even if it wasn't terrifying. As it was, I felt like I was reading about some high school or college kid who was in a mildly unpleasant situation---nothing to be really concerned about. This book will make its way back to the used book store in record time, no doubt about it.