It doesn’t work, and for a moment they’re both confronted with the horrible truth. He tries to explain it away as something not evil and wrong. The other boy recoils and tries to defend what happened as something else. One boy comes right out and says that it was murder. There’s a moment, after one boy has been killed where two boys talk around what happened. The thing that still stands out to me most about the book is how easily some boys began to think of others as not human, as animals to be hunted. So I went into the book with both some dread (expecting violence, which can be hard for me to read), and some, I don’t know, fascination, I guess? I guess I just found myself surprised about people feeling that way about a book that’s often referenced to describe uncontrolled violence or mayhem.Īnyway. For a long time I had a book that I read every year, too. When a book resonates with you like that, I get wanting to read it every year. That seemed really weird to me for a book with such a dark reputation. I think it’s Suzanne Collins who says that she reads LORD OF THE FLIES every year. But because I kept pushing back the date for posting the review, I have updated the review and added some more stuff that I’ve thought about on reflection.īefore I started reading LORD OF THE FLIES, I felt really weird reading all these big name authors talking about how pivotal this book has been for their writing. At that time, I actually wrote an initial review. I read the book last fall as things were heating up before the presidential election here in the US. I decided to read it first so she’d be ready for anything that might be difficult for her. My daughter had to read it for school last year, and she had some anxiety about the content.

LORD OF THE FLIES is one of those iconic books that gets referenced all the time in our culture, but I’d never read it before.

Lord of the flies william golding book