I still can't believe how well Stephen King does women.

Or in this case, a girl. As someone only a handful of years older than Trisha McFarland, the deliciously spunky, undoubtedly strong heroine of King's novella The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I can speak with some degree of confidence about the uncanny quality of her character. And, as this story is utterly character-based, I can only call it a triumph--though I fear that King fans in search of a tightly-plotted volume redolent with King's usual supernatural shenanigans will have to look elsewhere.

The year is 1998, and Trisha is a nine year old girl whose family--mom, dad, and petulant teenage brother--has been recently shattered by divorce. In an attempt at creating some semblance of togetherness, Trisha's mom Quilla drags her kids on one family-friendly field trip after another: to the auto museum, on a ski trip, and finally on a fateful summer hike through the Maine wilderness. Trisha only leaves the trail for a moment to pop a squat, but somewhat, she loses sight of her mother and brother--and so begins her nine-day-long harrowing trip through the wilderness.

Trisha is a tomboy, the kind, I admit, I always aspired to be as a little girl. She's a daddy's girl--she and her father share a love of baseball and of Red Sox player Tom Gordon--but her mother's imbibed her with enough just enough wilderness knowledge (which berries are safe, how to pee without getting your jeans wet) to keep her afloat. As Trisha stumbles through the forest, we become increasingly aware of the tensions of her age. She and her girlfriend Pepsi are just beginning to explore pop music, and sexuality (they beg their moms to let them dress up as the Spice Girls for Halloween), but still memorize Double Dutch rhymes. Though Trisha's speech is peppered with her father's aphorisms (the kind of King-speech that just barely missed setting my teeth on edge in Lisey's Story, but is put to much better use here), she's also been growing increasingly aware lately of his predilection for beer. Though her character arc may be slight, this is a coming-of-age story, and that's no better evident than when Trisha muses that, after this experience, she'll quit quoting her father and her grandmother and start penning sayings of her own.

It's good that King is so focused on Trisha's growth and character, because this truly is a character study, and not much besides eating berries and gathering nuts and following streams happens in this slim volume. There are hints of the supernatural, but they're never explained and could easily be hallucinatory, and the pacing flags a bit by the beginning of the "Bottom of the Seventh." But the book's short length and brisk structure saves it from being tiresome, and, like King's other meditations on claustrophobia (Gerald's Game, Misery) it's appropriately focused and realistically rendered. In a way, it recalls a book from my own youth--a story of a pair of snowbound teenagers called Snowbound!. But in that book, the relationship between the characters and nascent hints of romance were the focus. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is truly a story of survival, and Trisha's success rests squarely on her own shoulders, lending this book a feminist tint. Hell, never before have I felt so elated at the simple account of a girl catching a fish.

There are a few problems here, but they're slight: a post-script that feels a bit saccharine for all that's come before it, a bottom-heavy structure. But frankly? Trisha herself is just so awesome that I hardly cared. I wish I'd read this when I was younger--closer to Trisha's age--and could have more directly drawn inspiration from it. As it is, all I can do is remind myself that sometimes a girl's moxy and smarts really can save the day.