122THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON fear of the unknown and of a potentially hostile presence. She has a little picnic food in her backpack and a bottle of water and another of soda, but all this is soon gone. She drinks from the stream, picks checkerberries and their leaves, gorges on fiddleheads, and finds some beechnuts, which she mingles with the checkerberries and keeps in her backpack. She experiences vomiting and diarrhea, from the water, she thinks, and these signs of illness continue. Ingeniously, she cuts the hood from her poncho and uses it to catch trout, uses pine branches and needles to make a bed, and is wracked by severe coughs, sore throats, fevers, and chills. She ponders the injustice of dying when she is trying so hard to live, and wonders whether God exists and hears prayers. She often senses something or someone watching her. She fishes her Walkman out of her pack, finds a local station that broadcasts Red Sox games, and follows her favorite player and hero, Tom Gordon, a relief pitcher (a real figure but for the purposes of the story fictitious). She sometimes has hallucinations, during which Tom appears, at first very illusory, later walking beside her as a kind of adviser. Via the radio, she learns that search parties are looking for her, but because there has been a report that she was abducted, the search parties ironically never hunt where she is. She eventually spots the ruins of a gatepost and then a path, which she follows to a lane or road. The presence she felt turns out to be a huge old bear, which attacks just at the moment that an out-of-season hunter spots Trish and shoots the creature. Trish is taken to the hospital, treated for pneumonia, and enveloped in the love of her family. In the middle of the novel, just when the reader begins to lose interest with the sameness of things, the authorlearned a lesson in what friendship means. The girls' talk is filled with selfcentered chatter and whining, barbs, pretensions, petty sniping, backbiting, and parental put-downs typical of many preteens, and the cruelty of cliques is made abundantly clear. The quick changes from narrator to narrator are sometimes confusing. To the adult reader at least, the nastiness and sycophancy get tedious. ALA/YA. THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON (King*, Stephen, Scribner, 1999) Adult survival novel with sports-story aspects set in the wilds of western Maine and eastern New Hampshire at the time of publication. One Saturday in early June, while walking a portion of the Appalachian Trail with her mother, Quilla, who is divorced from her alcoholic husband, and her computer nerd older brother, Pete, 14, Trish (Patricia) McFarland, 9, big and intelligent for her age, wearies of the frequent arguments between Quilla and Pete. They pay no attention when she says she needs to relieve herself. She leaves the trail and decides to return by cutting through the trees and bushes. She is soon lost, and nine long, hard days pass before she rejoins her family. She surmounts many challenges with pluck, luck, and good sense. The terrain is difficult, with dense trees, heavy underbrush, swamps, and cliffs hindering her progress, and she falls frequently. Remembering that she read in one of the Little House books that if you are lost in the woods, you should follow a stream, and it will eventually lead you out, she finds one, and stays by it or another one much of the way. She also faces other problems that become more critical the longer she remains in the wilds: insect bites, lack of food and water, exposure, loneliness, and
