He does a very good job of it, I think. The other one is in Firestarter. The story would have been really similar with a boy protagonist, though he would have been more gender-conventional in terms of the baseball obsession and less in that his crush-object would have been the same gender, so I liked that King just chose to have his young hero be female. I would have really appreciated it as a younger reader, and I still do now.

I would tell your friend that if she hates The Gunslinger, to skip ahead to the next book and read the summary of the first. It's a really polarizing first book and so different in tone that it won't tell you if you'll like the rest of the series.