Imaginary Friend - Book Review

My first book by Stephen Chbosky and I couldn’t wait to dive into this much hyped book after knowing that this book came out 20 years after his previous release.

The book is about a 7 year old boy, Christopher, who comes to live in a new town with his mother as his mother runs away with him from an abusive relationship. Everything is going perfect until Christopher goes missing for 6 days. He returns with a voice in his head. He calls it his “Imaginary Friend” who needs help in building a tree house. After that, things are never the same.

I really liked the entire horror set up. It was gripping in the beginning and to the half way down. This 700+ pages long book could have been easily edited out to compress the plot. I just felt that there were 350 extra pages. A lot of repetitions only made me lose the interest in the book and I felt it could be a misprinted copy.

On a positive note, I kept reading the book because I was so invested in the characters. Stephen Chbosky has an admirable way to pen his character and their details. His storytelling technique is also brilliant with which he laid down the setup of a horror fantasy epic.

I wouldn’t say that I loved this book but it was a bit confusing for me. This is an apt book for Stephen Chbosky fans. I hope this book is made into a movie so that I can better understand the plot in a 2-3 hours long movie.