The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland steps off the Appalachian Trail in western Maine for a moment of privacy during a miserable hike with her divorcing mother and sullen older brother, takes a shortcut to catch up, and walks in the wrong direction. For the next nine days she is lost in the deep woods, working her way through mosquitoes, hunger, hypothermia, and a creeping sense that something is following her through the trees. Her lifeline is the Walkman in her pocket, where she listens to Boston Red Sox broadcasts featuring her hero, closer Tom Gordon, and slowly builds an imagined conversation with him in which she is a ninth-inning closer too. Stephen King's compact novel pairs plausible wilderness survival with his familiar supernatural pressure in a tight, moving portrait of a child under the worst possible conditions.
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What you might want to know about The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland steps off the Appalachian Trail to use the bathroom and gets lost. Across nine days alone in the Maine woods, she keeps her Walkman tuned to Red Sox games and talks to closer Tom Gordon.
Yes. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is one of Stephen King's quieter horror novels, focused on a 9-year-old lost in the Maine woods. Most readers find the wilderness-survival dread more sustained than the supernatural elements.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was written by Stephen King, published in 1999 by Pocket Books.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is 256 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a standalone novel by Stephen King, not part of a series.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.