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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Mass Market Paperback – February 1, 2000

by Stephen King (Author)

4.5 4,498 ratings

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The acclaimed #1 New York Times and undisputed King of Horror Stephen King offers a frightening suspense novel about a young girl who becomes lost in the woods as night falls.

On a six-mile hike on the Maine-New Hampshire branch of the Appalachian Trail, nine-year-old Trisha McFarland quickly tires of the constant bickering between her older brother, Pete, and her recently divorced mother. But when she wanders off by herself, and then tries to catch up by attempting a shortcut, she becomes lost in a wilderness maze full of peril and terror.

As night falls, Trisha has only her ingenuity as a defense against the elements, and only her courage and faith to withstand her mounting fears. For solace she tunes her Walkman to broadcasts of Boston Red Sox baseball games and follows the gritty performances of her hero, relief pitcher Tom Gordon. And when her radio’s reception begins to fade, Trisha imagines that Tom Gordon is with her—protecting her from an all-too-real enemy who has left a trail of slaughtered animals and mangled trees in the dense, dark woods…

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pocket Books
Publication date

February 1, 2000
Dimensions

4.19 x 0.74 x 6.75 inches
ISBN-10

0671042858
ISBN-13

978-0671042851
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Editorial Reviews

Review

The New York Times Frightening....Feverish terror.

San Francisco Examiner A gem....Superb.

People An absorbing tale...Tom Gordon scores big.

USA Today A delightful read, a literary walk in the woods, and not just for baseball fans.

The Wall Street Journal Impressive...A wonderful story of courage, faith, and hope. It is eminently engaging and difficult to put down.

New York Daily News A fast, scary read...King blasts a homer...[He] expertly stirs the major ingredients of the American psyche -- our spirituality, fierce love of children, passion for baseball, and collective fear of the bad thing we know lurks on the periphery of life.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch King paints a masterful, terrifying picture of every child's (and maybe adult's) worst fear...King uses that creepy-crawly paranoia to perfection.

Entertainment Weekly Plenty of thrills...[King's] an elegant writer and a master of pacing.

About the Author

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and an AT&T Audience Network original television series). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower and It are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

First Inning

Mom and Pete gave it a rest as they got their packs and Quilla's wicker plant-collection basket out of the van's back end; Pete even helped Trisha get her pack settled evenly on her back, tightening one of the straps, and she had a moment's foolish hope that now things were going to be all right.

"Kids got your ponchos?" Mom asked, looking up at the sky. There was still blue up there, but the clouds were thickening in the west. It very likely would rain, but probably not soon enough for Pete to have a satisfying whine about being soaked.

"I've got mine, Mom!" Trisha chirruped in her oh-boy-waterless-cookware voice.

Pete grunted something that might have been yes.

"Lunches?"

Affirmative from Trisha; another low grunt from Pete.

"Good, because I'm not sharing mine." She locked the Caravan, then led them across the dirt lot toward a sign marked TRAIL WEST, with an arrow beneath. There were maybe a dozen other cars in the lot, all but theirs with out-of-state plates.

"Bug-spray?" Mom asked as they stepped onto the path leading to the trail. "Trish?"

"Got it!" she chirruped, not entirely positive she did but not wanting to stop with her back turned so that Mom could have a rummage. That would get Pete going again for sure. If they kept walking, though, he might see something which would interest him, or at least distract him. A raccoon. Maybe a deer. A dinosaur would be good. Trisha giggled.

"What's funny?" Mom asked.

"Just me thinks," Trisha replied, and Quilla frowned -- "me thinks" was a Larry McFarland-ism. Well let her frown, Trisha thought. Let her frown all she wants, I'm with her, and I don't complain about it like old grouchy there, but he's still my Dad and I still love him.

Trisha touched the brim of her signed cap, as if to prove it.

"Okay, kids, let's go," Quilla said. "And keep your eyes open."

"I hate this," Pete almost groaned -- it was the first clearly articulated thing he'd said since they got out of the van, and Trisha thought: Please God, send something. A deer or a dinosaur or a UFO. Because if you don't, they're going right back at it.

God sent nothing but a few mosquito scouts that would no doubt soon be reporting back to the main army that fresh meat was on the move, and by the time they passed a sign reading NO. CONWAY STATION 5.5 MI., the two of them were at it full-bore again, ignoring the woods, ignoring her, ignoring everything but each other. Yatata-yatata-yatata. It was, Trisha thought, like some sick kind of making out.

It was a shame, too, because they were missing stuff that was actually pretty neat. The sweet, resiny smell of the pines, for instance, and the way the clouds seemed so close -- less like clouds than like draggles of whitish-gray smoke. She guessed you'd have to be an adult to call something as boring as walking one of your hobbies, but this really wasn't bad. She didn't know if the entire Appalachian Trail was as well-maintained as this -- probably not -- but if it was, she guessed she could understand why people with nothing better to do decided to walk all umpty-thousand miles of it. Trisha thought it was like walking on a broad, winding avenue through the woods. It wasn't paved, of course, and it ran steadily uphill, but it was easy enough walking. There was even a little hut with a pump inside it and a sign which read: WATER TESTS OK FOR DRINKING. PLEASE FILL PRIMER JUG FOR NEXT PERSON.

She had a bottle of water in her pack -- a big one with a squeeze-top -- but suddenly all Trisha wanted in the world was to prime the pump in the little hut and get a drink, cold and fresh, from its rusty lip. She would drink and pretend she was Bilbo Baggins, on his way to the Misty Mountains.

"Mom?" she asked from behind them. "Could we stop long enough to -- "

"Making friends is a job, Peter," her mother was saying. She didn't look back at Trisha. "You can't just stand around and wait for kids to come to you."

"Mom? Pete? Could we Please stop for just a -- "

"You don't understand," he said heatedly. "You don't have a clue. I don't know how things were when you were in junior high, but they're a lot different now."

"Pete? Mom? Mommy? There's a pump -- " Actually there was a pump; that was now the grammatically correct way to put it, because the pump was behind them, and getting farther behind all the time.

"I don't accept that," Mom said briskly, all business, and Trisha thought: No wonder she drives him crazy. Then, resentfully: They don't even know I'm here, The Invisible Girl, that's me. I might as well have stayed home. A mosquito whined in her ear and she slapped at it irritably.

They came to a fork in the trail. The main branch -- not quite as wide as an avenue now, but still not bad -- went off to the left, marked by a sign reading NO. CONWAY 5.2. The other branch, smaller and mostly overgrown, read KEZAR NOTCH 10.

"Guys, I have to pee," said The Invisible Girl, and of course neither of them took any notice; they just headed up the branch which led to North Conway, walking side by side like lovers and looking into each other's faces like lovers and arguing like the bitterest enemies. We should have stayed home, Trisha thought. They could have done this at home, and I could have read a book. The Hobbit again, maybe -- a story about guys who like to walk in the woods.

"Who cares, I'm peeing," she said sulkily, and walked a little way down the path marked KEZAR NOTCH. Here the pines which had stayed modestly back from the main trail crowded in, reaching with their blueblack branches, and there was underbrush, as well -- clogs and clogs of it. She looked for the shiny leaves that meant poison ivy, poison oak, or poison sumac, and didn't see any...thank God for small favors. Her mother had shown her pictures of those and taught her to identify them two years ago, when life had been happier and simpler. In those days Trisha had gone tramping in the woods with her mother quite a bit. (Pete's bitterest complaint about the trip to Plant-A-Torium was that their mother had wanted to go there. The obvious truth of this seemed to blind him to how selfish he had sounded, harping on it all day long.)

On one of their walks, Mom had also taught her how girls peed in the woods. She began by saying, "The most important thing -- maybe the only important thing -- is not to do it in a patch of poison ivy. Now look. Watch me and do it just the way I do it."

Trisha now looked both ways, saw no one, and decided she'd get off the trail anyway. The way to Kezar Notch looked hardly used -- little more than an alley compared to the broad thoroughfare of the main trail -- but she still didn't want to squat right in the middle of it. It seemed indecorous.

She stepped off the path in the direction of the North Conway fork, and she could still hear them arguing. Later on, after she was good and lost and trying not to believe she might die in the woods, Trisha would remember the last phrase she got in the clear; her brother's hurt, indignant voice: -- don't know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong!

She walked half a dozen steps toward the sound of his voice, stepping carefully around a clump of brambles even though she was wearing jeans instead of shorts. She paused, looked back, and realized she could still see the Kezar Notch path...which meant that anyone coming along it would be able to see her, squatting and peeing with a half-loaded knapsack on her back and a Red Sox cap on her head. Em-bare-ASS-ing, as Pepsi might say (Quilla Andersen had once remarked that Penelope Robichaud's picture should be next to the word vulgar in the dictionary).

Trisha went down a mild slope, her sneakers slipping a little in a carpet of last year's dead leaves, and when she got to the bottom she couldn't see the Kezar Notch path anymore. Good. From the other direction, straight ahead through the woods, she heard a man's voice and a girl's answering laughter -- hikers on the main trail, and not far away, by the sound. As Trisha unsnapped her jeans it occurred to her that if her mother and brother paused in their oh-so-interesting argument, looking behind them to see how sis was doing, and saw a strange man and woman instead, they might be worried about her.

Good! Give them something else to think about for a few minutes. Something besides themselves.

The trick, her mother had told her on that better day in the woods two years ago, wasn't going outdoors -- girls could do that every bit as well as boys -- but to do it without soaking your clothes.

Trisha held onto the conveniently jutting branch of a nearby pine, bent her knees, then reached between her legs with her free hand, yanking her pants and her underwear forward and out of the firing line. For a moment nothing happened -- wasn't that just typical -- and Trish sighed. A mosquito whined bloodthirstily around her left ear, and she had no hand free with which to slap at it.

"Oh waterless cookware!" she said angrily, but it was funny, really quite deliciously stupid and funny, and she began to laugh. As soon as she started laughing she started peeing. When she was done she looked around dubiously for something to blot with and decided -- once more it was her father's phrase -- not to push her luck. She gave her tail a little shake (as if that would really do any good) and then yanked up her pants. When the mosquito buzzed the side of her face again, she slapped it briskly and looked with satisfaction at the small bloody smear in the cup of her palm. "Thought I was unloaded, partner, didn't you?" she said.

Trisha turned back toward the slope, and then turned around again as the worst idea of her life came to her. This idea was to go forward instead of backtracking to the Kezar Notch trail. The paths had forked in a Y; she would simply walk across the gap and rejoin the main trail. Piece of cake. There was no chance of getting lost, because she could hear the voices of the other hikers so clearly. There was really no chance of getting lost at all.

Copyright © 1999 by Stephen King

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pocket Books; First Thus edition (February 1, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0671042858
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0671042851
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.19 x 0.74 x 6.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #628,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11,114 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)
- #30,774 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #31,961 in Suspense Thrillers

Customer Reviews:
4.5 4,498 ratings

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Stephen King

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Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.

King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.

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Julie Hutton

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

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2017

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The book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King is a book based on nine year old Trisha McFarland and the struggles she faces when she finds herself lost in the woods, on what she thought was just another normal day taking a hike with her mother and brother. After straying off the path, Trisha was fighting for her own survival. Stephen focused the book fully on fear, along with all the emotions and obstacles that Trisha faces. This book is a horror fiction novel based out of the woods of the Appalachian Trail in Maine that winds toward New Hampshire in 1998.
I personally thought that there were a few little parts throughout the book that were kind of slow, just Trisha walking through the woods, but yet I never lost interest in the book. Other than that, I really enjoyed the book. I definitely felt a connection with Trisha in the book. I always was worried about what was going to happen to her and hoped that she would make it out of the woods.
Trisha McFarland is the daughter of Quilla Anderson and Pete McFarland, who were just recently divorced. Her brother, Pete, is having a hard time handling the situation and wished he could have stayed with his father. Pete and his mother continuously fight about everything, but mostly the divorce. Quilla decided that they needed to spend some family time together, so they started doing something together every Saturday that Trisha and Pete weren’t with their father.
This weekends trip was a six-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail. As they were bickering on the hike, Trisha slowly lost sight of her mother and brother as she went looking for a place to go to the bathroom. Trisha ends up by herself, lost, and not sure what to do. All she has with her is her backpack and the clothes that are on her back.
Trisha used the walkman that was in her backpack to listen to the Red Sox games every night. Trisha’s favorite player on the Red Sox was closing pitcher, Tom Gordon. Throughout her journey she used her imagination to visualize that Tom Gordon was there with her in the woods. Imagining that Tom was there with her helped Trisha make it through the day a lot easier. She talked to Tom everyday as she walked through the woods.
Trisha was my favorite character in the book, not just because she was the main one, but because of how brave and strong she was the whole time while being lost in the woods by herself. As a nine year old girl and being lost by herself in the woods for almost ten days, I think that she held it together very well. She definitely had some knowledge about plants and berries, which played a huge part in her survival. Without that previous knowledge, she could have easily not survived as long.
Stephen King, also known as “The King of Terror”, is one of today’s most well-known and best-selling horror-thriller authors. King has a very unique style of writing that stands out to many readers. King writes in such a way that his readers are able to not just read the book, but they are able to visualize what was going on.
The book was based in the year 1998, and it takes place in Western Maine on the Appalachian Trail. The book is written in third-person point of view, but for most of the story it is written in such a way that it seems that Trisha is the narrator. At times though, King would jump to Quilla’s or Pete’s point of view, or just plainly give us some insight on what was going on outside of the woods.
I think that The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is definitely worth reading. I’m not a person who likes to read a lot, but yet I found myself not being able to put the book down at times. This is actually the first book I have read by King, but I absolutely enjoyed it and plan on reading more of his books.

6 people found this helpful

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Marny D.

Makes You Think Twice about Trying an Unfamiliar Trail in the Woods

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2014

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If you're a hiker or simply love to visit parks and enjoy nature (I am both), you've probably wondered at some point what it would be like to be lost in the woods (if you haven't already had that experience). Either way, when you read this book, you will feel like you have been lost in the wilderness with Trisha McFarland.

My favorite quality of Stephen King's work is his ability to create an extremely detailed account of what his characters are seeing and feeling. I've read this book at least four times over the years because it's easy to become absorbed in the process of getting lost with Trisha as she makes choice after choice that takes her farther and farther into isolated, wild territory. It's also inspiring because she is very resourceful in her desperate bid for survival. Love of her family and a baseball team plays a part in shoring up the strength of her mental state, thus the title relation. This story makes you think about what you would do if you were suddenly cut off from everything you know and love. Who is the first person you would miss? What else would you feel you could not do without? You want to cheer for Trisha to get back to her life, which although imperfect as is everyone's, is perceptively dear to her. The story also starts to dip into the mystical, like looking into a fun house mirror, you wonder, along with the main character, if things really are what they appear to be or something else entirely, not of this world.

I can say for certain this is my favorite Stephen King book and would fully recommend it to be enjoyed over and over again. I appreciate that there is not a lot of gore in it, which allows Stephen King's adeptness for creating rich verbal descriptions to stand alone without much of a shock factor. As readers and movie goers, we all know and love Stephen King for his scary tales, but I think it's important to appreciate his descriptions of environment and feeling on their own. He makes reading more vibrant and palpable. That's what draws me back to some of his books again and again. This would be a good read on a vacation to the mountains or woods! I'm going out on a limb here, no pun intended, but let's face it, sometimes we read to get lost and get away from the normal stress of life; well this book will help you get lost for a little while. Enjoy!

Other books by Stephen King with similar attributes mentioned in this review are The Long Walk, From a Buick 8, and Rose Madder.

10 people found this helpful

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Janice Hyde

A wonderful book.

Reviewed in Canada on January 18, 2024

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One of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Recommended it to a number of friends. A book for all ages❤️

Jean Carlos Nunes

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book

Reviewed in Brazil on November 23, 2022

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Um dos melhores itens da minha coleção!!

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Ulises Gut.

Bueno de segunda mano

Reviewed in Mexico on July 27, 2021

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Llegó en muy buenas condiciones, salvo por que trae el nombre de alguna persona en la primera página. Pero es de segunda mano por lo que no tengo problema

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Joana

Adoro esta edição!

Reviewed in Spain on January 29, 2021

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Não é o melhor livro do SK, mas adorei conhecer esta protagonista e vivi intensamente a sua aventura.
Esta edição é linda, é ainda mais bonita ao vivo!

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ravanan

Timepass read .

Reviewed in India on November 20, 2020

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When it's comes to stephen novel , its below average when compares his own work like Shawshank , green mile