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review 2020-04-27 12:23
Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky
Imaginary Friend - Stephen Chbosky

This review can also be found at Carole's Random Life in Books.

I really enjoyed this book! This is a big book and somewhat intimidating due to its length. It is a big story though and I felt like all of those pages really were necessary. I have not read this author's previous novel but as soon as I saw this book, I knew that I needed to get my hands on a copy. My instincts were right and this book ended up being a wonderful experience.

Christopher and his mother, Kate, begin this journey in the middle of the night fleeing Kate's abusive boyfriend. They end up in a small town in Pennsylvania where Kate starts a job at the nursing home and Christopher starts making friends at school. They live in a hotel room and Christopher appreciates all of the small things his mother does for him. Then Christopher goes missing for an entire week and everything changes.

This is Christopher's story but it is also the story of all of the town's residents. We get to learn the backgrounds, the secrets, and motivations for all of the key players in town. Each piece of knowledge adds to the overall story and I loved it when a piece of the puzzle snapped into place. I thought that the story was really imaginative and there were some pretty amazing twists that I never saw coming. The cast of characters was quite large and very well done.

Christine Lakin did a fabulous job with the narration. She handled a very large cast of characters incredibly well with each character sounding unique. I thought that she added a lot of excitement into the story as well as the character's emotions. She has a very pleasant voice that was easy to listen to for hours at a time. This was my first experience in listening to her narration work and I was very impressed.

I would recommend this book to others. I thought this was a very well done story that was entertaining from beginning to end. I am thinking it might finally be time to give The Perks of Being a Wallflower at try.

I received a review copy of this book from Grand Central Publishing and I borrowed a copy of the audiobook from my local library.

Initial Thoughts
I liked this book. I have not read The Perks of Being a Wallflower so I had the opportunity to look at this book with fresh eyes. Chbosky is most definitely a fine storyteller. There is a whole lot going on in this book and I loved it when a piece of the overall puzzle would snap into place. I felt fully immersed in this world and wanted nothing more than to see Christopher come out of everything better than when he went in. I listened to the audiobook and I thought that the narrator did a fantastic job with this story.

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review 2020-04-21 14:15
Imaginary Friend ★★★★☆
Imaginary Friend - Stephen Chbosky

Imaginary Friend is a hard book to review. I struggled even with deciding on how many stars to rate it. It's kind of a mess, in terms of pacing, plotting, and themes. Most of the characters are just archetypes. But the story and the imagery was so compelling I could not put it down or stay away for long. I kept coming back for more. I've been reading so much horror for so long that I'm not often moved or chilled, but there were many small moments in this book that felt somehow fresh and new and awful. 

 

It really needed a heavier hand with the editing, though. Remember the complaints about the LotR movie The Return of the King had about 10 different endings - every time you thought the story resolved, it picked up and told a new ending? That's this book. At one point last night, I was yelling at the book in my best Monty Python voice, "Get on with it!"  There was a lot of weird Christian allegory, but I'm not enough of a church-goer to parse it. 

 

And yet. And yet, I still would recommend it. 

 

Hardcover version, picked up on a whim at Half Price Books, when I set a goal for myself to pick a hardcover of an author I'm unfamiliar with from the Horror section, without reading reviews or anything other than the jacket blurb. 

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review 2019-12-01 00:44
Simply Fantastic
Imaginary Friend - Stephen Chbosky

Fans of 2009’s Perks of Being a Wallflower (the book and popular movie based on it) by Stephen Chbosky might be surprised by his recent foray into a completely different genre—adult horror. Chbosky has been busy in recent years as a screenwriter, but it has been 10 years since the release of that debut YA novel.  It was worth the wait: Chbosky has given readers a marvelous tome of a book with Imaginary Friend.  Reminiscent of the best early works of Stephen King, Imaginary Friend brings back that experience of feverishly whipping through thick and well-worn copies with a combined sense of terror and delight.  The homage to King is obvious, but Chbosky skillfully alludes to his predecessor while bringing a unique perspective and style of his own—one that may even surpass his model.  As the novel opens, Christopher Reese and his mother are moving to Mill Grove as they try to find some reprieve from the string of bad circumstances that followed his father’s death.  The small town appears ideal as a place to hide and begin anew, but of course, it also happens to have a dark history of suspicious and supernatural child disappearances.  Imaginary Friend features the prototypical young boy with special powers that emerge and harness his strong moral core and innate goodness. He is tasked with leading a misfit group of friends in a seemingly hopeless quest to save the world from imminent takeover by an evil force.  Christopher humbly bears responsibility for saving the world and protecting his loved ones, even if it means that he must sacrifice himself.  Chilling and exciting from beginning to end, Chbosky uses this familiar setup to build a story that excels at not only bringing thrills, but also manages to be inspirational and uplifting as well.  The 700+ pages fly by, leaving a breathless reader satisfied but wishing for more. Great for fans of sprawling stories with a large cast of excellently developed characters and anyone who yearns for a book truly worthy of their time.

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review 2019-09-28 22:31
Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky
Imaginary Friend - Stephen Chbosky

This is the long-awaited second novel from the author of 'Perks of Being a Wallflower'. This is a completely different beast, however, so enough about that.

 

Christopher is seven and this is not the first time that his mother Kate has made them pack up what they can of their lives and escape in the middle of the night from a dangerous boyfriend. They end up in a remote town in Pennsylvania and hope for the best. Christopher then goes missing and is not seen for six days. When he comes back, things are different: he suddenly overcomes his dyslexia, Kate wins the lottery and buys a dream house, and Christopher continues to talk to the "Nice Man" that helped him out of the woods. The Nice Man has a warning for him, however, bad things won't be staying in the woods anymore, for Christopher to stop bad things from happening he has to build a treehouse before Christmas....

 

I feel like this might be a case of an author working too long on a manuscript. There was some great initial character development and I love the plot, but at over 700 pages the book is overlong and poorly paced. The treehouse was finished within a few hundred pages. 400 pages of impending apocalypse wears down the suspense. Character development and, frankly, many of the character's actions become redundant as the book goes on. Later additions to the 'Hellraiser' films come to mind. A story can sustain mounting, disgusting horror only for so long before I begin to glaze over. Speaking of that, I hate to make the unfavorable Stephen King comparisons, buuuut…this book needed an aggressive editor.

 

I was very disappointed. Don't believe the hype. I don't like writing poor reviews, but Chbosky is a writer that can do better.

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review 2019-09-17 00:00
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky Teen Me gives it 4.5 stars. Adult me more like 3. I appreciate how much Charlie cries! I didn't realize it as a teen. I was swept up in the story about finding friends who are like family. I felt like his voice was very naive to the point where it didn't square with him being sexual or people considering him a sexual being. Because of the format there's no way for us to see Charlie from outside of himself. The child abuse aspect is written in so obliquely that it's possible to read and not think of that as a major plot point, and it seems intentional? It's a story about Charlie opening up to himself. And that includes dealing with heavy trauma, but also finding out that you love your family and you can be resilient.
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