Review: 11/22/63 by Stephen King (Spoiler-Free)

Well... I have officially read a book over 1,000 pages. That’s a start. As you can probably imagine, it’s hard to start a review about a book that long, simply because so much happened. I guess I’ll start off by saying that throughout the story, you can tell that there is a larger force working behind the scenes, and the mystery of that alone is something that got me to keep reading. Of course the rest of the book was great as well, but that underlying need to know helped get me through some of the duller sections. This is the first Stephen King book where I’ve loved the characters. In the other two that I have read, I was specifically there for the plot, and liked the characters enough to care, but I didn’t feel super attached to them like I did in this book. However, while I did find myself loving most characters, sometimes I found it a bit confusing to remember them all, considering that so many had the same first name. To add on to this, I am not a person who is very interested in history in school, and while for once, I found this historical fiction to be very interesting, sometimes I did feel a bit confused- or “out of the loop” as a certain Jake Epping might say to a certain Sadie Dunhill- about the politics aspect. It seemed like King assumed that we would know exactly what political views JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald had. (For some this is common knowledge, and while I obviously did know the basics, some people might not. Especially any readers from other countries.) The ending for me seemed a little bit rushed. I guess this book didn’t really need more pages lol, but I felt like I had been waiting for the whole book to build up to this one moment... and it was over in five seconds. Overall, I was surprised at how it actually wasn’t too hard to get through an 1,000 page book. (Not that I’m ready for another one any time soon though 😂.)

Song I was reminded of while reading: Jailhouse Rock