When on holiday in Sweden I offer only one piece of advice - do not venture off the path. In the UK we have many clumps of trees that we have the tenacity to call forests. Sweden's forests mock our forests and call them twigs! In Sweden the tree line is incredibly dense and you lose sight of the path only metres in. This is what happened to my little sister and I when we decided to hide from our parents. We waited 10 minutes for them to walk past so that we could jump out - but they never came past. Being well behaved brats we retraced our steps and waited by the car. Some 30 minutes later my parents turned up out of breath and panicking. They had run all around .  Read the complete review

Right. As soon as my daughter reaches her third birthday, I’m going to read this book to her. I’ll read it to her at bedtime so she’ll have time alone to reflect on the seriousness of the story. Why? Because I’m a parent who has put herself in the place of the little girl in this story and who trembles at the thought of anything like that happening to her own child or any other. Maybe they ought to make a cardboard book of it with lots of bright pictures so that babies can start subconsciously absorbing the moral of this story – namely, not to wander off the path and away from their mummy when walking through huge, scary, wild woods of the ..  Read the complete review

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is one of the strangest of Stephen Kings' books. He moves away from the normal type of horror that he has become well known for as this on the face of it is a real fear rather than a supernatural one. While she is walking in the woods with her family, Trisha becomes separated from her mother and brother, as she has become tired of hearing them arguing but she falls too far behind and soon realises that she does not know where they are, or even where she is. In an attempt to find them she wanders deeper and deeper into the woods soon having to accept that she is lost and falling prey to a number of dreams and ...  Read the complete review

First question - who is Tom Gordon? He is a baseball player who closes for the Boston Red Sox, so in the U.K he is almost completely unknown. Unsurprisingly, Stephen King's novel is not based around a baseball season, but a young girls desperate struggle for survival. Trisha McFarland is off on a day-trip to the woods with her mother and brother. The two are arguing as usual due to the mother and father breaking up and having to move to a new area. Trisha has had enough and so leaves the trail momentairily to have a break from the endless bickering, but as she tries to rejoin the trail, she manages to get lost in the woods. What follows is a tough battle for ...  Read the complete review

I finished this particular book just over a week ago; it’s not the “thickest” book I’ve ever read, little fewer than 300 pages. To say I thoroughly enjoyed this book would be a lie but it was entertaining enough to keep my interest to some degree. I had wondered before, after reading Hearts In Atlantis, whether Stephen King had lost his flair and run out of his really good ideas, and this book actually confirmed it for me. I may be wrong he may have a little something up his sleeve and just waiting for the right time to bring it out but, after reading all but three of all the books he has ever written and enjoying all of them, ...  Read the complete review