Before reading: Hello and welcome to the 2000s! I am very excited to start a new decade of King! Now, you might be thinking, "wait a minute, didn't The Green Mile come out in 1996?" It sure did. The Green Mile was originally released as separate installments from March to August of 1996. In 2000, it was released as a full novel. Mainly for selfish reasons (I wanted to read Wizard and Glass) I decided to hold off on reading this one. I hope you can forgive me. I also hope you can forgive me for what I'm about to say. I...have never seen The Green Mile. I know! I just never watched it! And then I decided I wanted to wait until I finished reading it to watch it so I've been purposefully not watching it. I have a rough idea of what it is about based on what I know from the movie and just from what I've been exposed to by just being in the King fandom. This is a big one. It is kind of hard to avoid any spoilers. Regardless of what I already know, I am very much looking forward to both reading and watching this one.
After reading: I don't think I need to tell you that this was a really great book, but...this was a really great book. Honestly, I could see myself reading it again one day and that's not something I do too often. It had all of the ingredients it needed to be a really good read. It had interesting and lovable characters, it had terrible antagonists, it was emotional, it was scary, it was face paced and not too long. What's not to like? If you're looking for a good, quick read...this is the book for you.
I could get super analytical with this book and all the metaphors and deeper meanings...but I'm not going to do that. This book did a great job of making the undertones clear without it taking you away from the story. Also, personally, I just prefer to read and enjoy a book without getting too into it. However, if you like to analyze and dig deep into novels then this would be a book I think you'd quite enjoy. All that is to say, I took some notes and they were all pretty surface level as I was just having a good time reading. First and foremost...we have a fictional King town/county in Georgia! If you didn't know, I live in Georgia so that was fun. A strange thing I noticed was in the previous novel I read, Hearts in Atlantis, as well as this one, there was a dog named Bowser. Perhaps King was playing a lot of Super Mario Bros in the late 90's. I could be wrong but I do believe that this was officially the first book that I have cried over. And no, I didn't cry at the part I was supposed to cry at, I cried over a mouse. More than once. Mr. Jingles is my favorite character in any book ever (okay, maybe that's a bit hyperbolic but I love him and have a lot of emotions about him at the moment). Like I had never been that upset reading a book before, I had to stop reading it. Mr. King likes to pretend he's the master of horror but he's a big ol' softy.
One last note, and unfortunately it is a bit of a gripe, was in regards to the format. As I mentioned, this book was not published as an entire novel originally, it was published in pieces. I am glad I live in the year 2024 and was able to read it all at once because it would have KILLED ME to wait to keep reading. Due to the nature of the publication, each chapter had a bit of a recap at the beginning. I completely understand that in the original format and would have appreciated it at the time. However, it being in one novel that isn't very long, made for some annoying redundancy. I wish King would have gone back and cleaned up the recapping for the full novel.
tl;dr...such a great book. I am very excited to finally watch the film, although I'm sure that one will actually make me cry at the part most normal people cry at. I'm glad I read this story, I shouldn't have waited so long, and I hope if you haven't read it that this inspires you to read it, too.
Call the Space Force cause up next we are reading Dreamcatcher.
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