Lord of the Flies Book Review

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

This is one of the books I had to read for summer reading and I did not enjoy it at all, which may be an unpopular opinion. This book was about a group of boys that crashed into an island, but all the adults on the plane got killed during the crash. This book follows the children changing throughout the story, some trying to be civil and some became savages. That's the premise of the book so I’m going to start giving spoilers and my thoughts about certain problems that really bugged me.

Spoiler Alert

The pacing of this novel is really off because the beginning super slow and the end moves super quickly and it ends too perfectly. The writing style was also not my favorite because I believe that it was too descriptive. For example, “He looked critically at Ralph’s golden body and then down at his own clothes”(5). They had this sentence right after they described one of the main characters, Ralph, so they described him twice one after another. This book also has poor fat representation because the “fat” character is portrayed as smart but not very physically able and he is also portrayed as loud mouth know it all. All of the kids want to follow the people who look better because the author was trying to show survival of the fittest, but there could have been a better way to do this.

“ ‘Better Piggy than Fatty,’ he said at last, with the directness of genuine leadership, ‘and anyways, I’m sorry if you feel like that. Now go back, Piggy, and take names. That’s your job. So long.’ ” (23).

Ralph is supposed to be the leader at this point but he already broke a promise to Piggy and gave up that nick name that he said that he did not want to be called. The writing in this section also bugged me because the author pretty much said that being a leader is just about being direct and confident but there is some much more to it. Being a leader is supposed to be a leader to everyone and not just people with the “correct” body shape.

“He could go step by step inside that fat head of his, only Piggy was no chief. But Piggy, for all his ludicrous body, had brains” (85).

This section does not make sense to me, because yes Piggy is smart and he’s not chief material but what does that have to do with his body shape? I don’t think that the author had to bring this up, body shape does not have anything to do with leadership ability. The author shouldn’t have brought body shape into this sentence which would have definitely improved the rating.

Jack, the leader of the savages, was mean to everybody from the beginning and people still listened to him from the beginning. He never cared about getting rescued, because all he wanted to do was kill a pig the whole time, which was what Raph and him always argued about.

One of the characters I actually enjoyed reading from was Simon, he was supposed to represent innocents. He cared for both the little children and the older children. He just wanted to help everyone, which was a nice change from the rest of the story.

When the story was starting to wrap up there were two major character deaths which were actually really well written. These two deaths were Simon and Piggy. Simon died first and that was by the group of savages because they thought he was the ‘bestie’ that he was hunting. Simon’s death was supposed to represent the death of innocents. Piggy was killed by Roger with a rock, and his death was representing the lack of logic, so everyone became full savages.

The rest of the novel was Ralph hiding from the group of savages so he is not killed. Then on the last page the navy finally finds the group of boys and questions Ralph about what ended up going on the island and Ralph finally shows his emotions. And then the story just ends, right on the island after Ralph realized he liked Piggy.

If you liked this book tell me why, and what you got out of it? Sorry for the little rant, but I did enjoy writing this review.