Girl who loved Tom Gordon

I was running short of time when I reached the library last time. I couldn’t see any of the books which I had marked last time I was there. I spent 10 minutes browsing various titles. I picked up and kept down “The Alchemist” – “Maybe next time” I said to myself. I also checked out a couple of books by Stephen King but all of them looked bulky and I wasn’t sure I wanted to invest so much of my time in reading a horror book. One of them even had a creepy alien’s face on the front page – stuff the nightmares are made up of! Finally I selected a relatively slimmer offering of his – “Girl who loved Tom Gordon”. The plot looked promising enough – a nine-year old getting lost in the woods. And the back cover had these lines at the end of the synopsis – There’s something else in the woods – watching, waiting!

The first few pages were good enough and then little Trisha got lost in the woods. Her nightmare began and mine too with her. Somehow I felt that King put in too much of detail of her surroundings in the story. The mosquitoes and insects were mentioned frequently and in agonizing detail. I agree it added to the horror of the kid’s situation but I think that only screenplay of a horror movie merits such details. When made part of a paper book, they excruciatingly slowed the pace of the story - in my humble opinion.

I don’t understand a thing about baseball and so the details of how Tom Gordon was playing made me skip many pages. And that’s what made me wonder if I should go on with this book. I hate abandoning any book right in the middle of reading. But this time I didn’t seem to have much of a choice. I just quickly skipped to the end of the book to check if little Trisha survived this ordeal. I am taking the book back to the library. I don’t want to know anything more about the girl who loved Tom Gordon.