Goodreads synopsis: During 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 and her recently divorced mother. But when she wanders off by herself, 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 headphones to broadcasts of Boston Red Sox baseball games and follows the gritty performances of her hero, relief pitcher Tom Gordon. And when the reception begins to fade, Trisha imagines that Tom Gordon is with her—the protector from an enemy who may or may not be imagined…one who is watching her, waiting for her in the dense, dark woods…
My rating: 2 stars.
Content warnings: R. Lots of cursing, and some violence toward an animal.
Thoughts: I really should have put this one down when I realized King is terrible at writing child narrators. But I felt obligated because of book club, so I kept reading. And mistakes were made...
There are some authors who should stay away from writing child narrators at all costs, and King is one of them. It becomes very creepy and uncomfortable, to the point that I genuinely hope that's not how these authors think that kids really are, because if they do... maybe I see a pedophile around every corner, but it still makes me nervous.
Beyond that, the book was pretty boring. I was expecting something frightful and fascinating, and instead only got 250 pages of a pre-teen girl tromping around the forest and fantasizing about an adult baseball player. There was sort of a monster at the end, but by that point I was so zoned out I didn't really notice or care about what was going on, because I knew how it would end anyway. So it was yawn inducingly predictable too.
Occasionally it seemed to switch POVs to someone else, and show how they were reacting to Trisha's disappearance. And that could have been interesting, if it had actually been done well rather than just making the book more confusion. The POV breaks were not clear, and only lasted a couple paragraphs, so by the time I realized this wasn't Trisha's POV, it was over again and I was forced back into Trisha's head.
All in all it was another disappointing let down from Stephen King, and I'm not sure how many more chances to give him before giving up on his fiction altogether.
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