The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon for July?

The Goodwin Library Book Club will be meeting June 19th to discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald's timeless classic The Great Gatsby. Copies are available at the library! At the meeting, we can discuss some of the books we'd like to read for the rest of the year. To have copies ready for the next meeting, however, I wanted to have the July book selected and then we can work from there. I was considering The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King. The novel is a short, breezy summer read that takes place in New Hampshire and offers a lot to talk about through it's unique writing structure, unreliable narrator, and exciting tale of human perseverance and survival in the New Hampshire wilderness. Here's a synopsis of the novel from Amazon.com. Please let me know what you think! The July meeting will be July 17th at 6PM.

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....

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.