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Amazon.com Review

With a convincing mix of youthful optimism and world-weary resignation, reader Anne Heche adds resonance to this unabridged recording. Heche is especially effective as the 9-year-old heroine, Trisha McFarland, who makes a fateful decision during an afternoon hike with her dysfunctional family. "The paths had forked in a 'Y.' She would simply walk across the gap and rejoin the main trail. Piece of cake. There was no chance of getting lost." As one might suspect, there is every chance she'll get lost--or worse--and taking the shortcut turns out to be a very bad choice indeed. At times Heche's reading may be too measured, but her narration is generally quite good and her steady portrayal of a young girl lost renders this tale all the more frightening. (Running time: 6.5 hours, 6 cassettes) --George Laney

From Publishers Weekly

"The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted." King's new novelAwhich begins with that sentenceAhas teeth, too, and it bites hard. Readers will bite right back. Always one to go for the throat, King crafts a story that concerns not just anyone lost in the Maine-New Hampshire woods, but a plucky nine-year-old girl, and from a broken home, no less. This stacked deck is flush with aces, however. King has always excelled at writing about children, and Trisha McFarland, dressed in jeans and a Red Sox jersey and cap when she wanders off the forest path, away from her mother and brother and toward tremendous danger, is his strongest kid character yet, wholly believable and achingly empathetic in her vulnerability and resourcefulness. Trisha spends nine days (eight nights) in the forest, ravaged by wasps, thirst, hunger, illness, loneliness and terror. Her knapsack with a little food and water helps, but not as much as the Walkman that allows her to listen to Sox games, a crucial link to the outside world. Love of baseball suffuses the novel, from the chapter headings (e.g., "Bottom of the Ninth") to Trisha's reliance, through fevered imagined conversations with him, on (real life) Boston pitcher Tom Gordon and his grace under pressure. King renders the woods as an eerie wonderland, one harboring a something stalking Trisha but also, just perhaps, God: he explicitly explores questions of faith here (as he has before, as in Desperation) but without impeding the rush of the narrative. Despite its brevity, the novel ripples with ideas, striking images, pop culture allusions and recurring themes, plus an unnecessary smattering of scatology. It's classic King, brutal, intensely suspenseful, an exhilarating affirmation of the human spirit. 1,250,000 first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC and QPB featured alternates; simultaneous audiocassette and CD, read by Anne Heche.
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