The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

“The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old.”

This quote opens the novel, foreshadowing Trisha’s experiences in the woods by hinting at the danger lurking in the everyday. It also introduces an omniscient third-person narrator who is privy to information that characters themselves do not know.

“Trisha, as was increasingly her habit, became brightly enthusiastic. These days she often sounded to herself like a contestant on a TV game show, all but peeing in her pants at the thought of winning a set of waterless cookware. And how did she feel to herself these days? Like glue holding together two pieces of something that was broken. Weak glue.”

Before getting lost, Trisha’s biggest problem is her fractured family dynamic. She’s only nine years old but feels responsible for holding together her family by acting perpetually cheerful, suppressing the normal emotions of a child undergoing a shift in her family’s structure.

“Her voice trembled, became first the wavery voice of a little kid and then almost the shriek of a baby who lies forgotten in her pram, and that sound frightened her more than anything else so far on this awful morning, the only human sound in the woods her weepy, shrieking voice calling for help, calling for help because she was lost.”

Trisha’s reaction to getting lost in the woods underscores the fact that she is a kid suddenly thrust into a terrifying situation. While she initially tries to remain strong, she breaks down and cries when she accepts that she is in danger. This is the first time we’ve seen Trisha show a strong emotion, as she usually bottles up her feelings to make her family life easier. Her breakdown foreshadows how being lost in the woods will help her connect to her emotions and get to know herself better.