Brock Cole

At a summer camp, a unbelievably cruel prank is played on one girl and one boy. Their fellow campers, boys on one side of the camp and girls on the other, take their victim to an island near the camp, strip them both naked, and leave them abandoned there for the night. In the morning, they will go back and get them. The author doesn't tell how old the kids are, but based on a couple of sentences describing their bodies (what stage of physical puberty they were in), I imagined them to be 11 show more or 12 years old.
The boy and girl find each other. Needless to say, they are not eager to return to this camp. They manage to get off the island during the night and make it shore elsewhere. They decide they don't want to be found.
What follows is part survivalist story as the boy and girl struggle to eat, find safe warm places to sleep, and avoid capture by anybody. But what made this book so superb was the quickly developing relationship between the two kids. They start out naked, then in improvised clothing, and then in stolen clothes. (I assume this book is frequently banned or challenged because of this nakedness. Neither the author nor the characters dwell on this, and at no point in the book do the kids have sex, or do anything sexual; but there are a few adult characters in the story who assume otherwise.) I was empathetic with these kids (as a child I was often the victim of bullying or at least the butt of mean jokes) and I loved the way the story played out. show less

As Linda speaks about the chain of events that led to the murder-suicide of two men she knew, the tragic story of the 13-year-old's life unfolds. To hear Linda tell it, these are the facts of her existence; nothing to feel bad about. In fact, Linda doesn't feel anything at all. In Brock Cole's somber, skillful narrative, the reader supplies what Linda, at first, cannot--an emotional response to the hard and horrifying facts of Linda's life, which has been characterized by abuse and show more abandonment. But at the group home for girl's where Linda is staying, the barrier to emotions that Linda has built over the years in self defense shows signs of cracking, and in those small spaces, fragile signs of hope emerge for this bright yet battered child. CCBC categories: Fiction for Teenagers. 1997, Front Street, 184 pages, $15.95. Ages 14 and older. (CCBC-Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices, 1997). Won Booklist Book Review Stars, October 1, 1997 ; United States. show less

Look at the different covers. Depending on how you read it, where you are in your life, what your expectations are, this can fit any of them. It's an adventure about two kids on their own. It's a companion to [b:Lord of the Flies|7624|Lord of the Flies|William Golding|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327869409s/7624.jpg|2766512]. It's poetically written *L*iterature with a quest and grand metaphysical themes. You choose.

Though I actually read the one with just the uninhabited lake shore, show more I'm recording the blue and pink, with Laura in the pink shirt and Howie sitting on the ground. To me, the characters were more important than any deep literary symbolism. The blue for boy, pink for girl, are easy symbols, and that's the level I read this book on. The way they're self-absorbed, looking in different directions but still very aware of each other, is key to my understanding of the book.

One could go deeper, and consider the title Goats and the goat smell in the deputy's pickup, the reason the girl was so helpless at first and the boy quite resourceful, the reason Lockwood kept the IOU instead of accepting payment, the fact that just about the only people who weren't evil were some of the Black inner-city campers, the abrupt ending, etc. I recommend doing so if you're up to it, for example if you choose this book for a book report for school.

Some of the ideas explored here are surely so subtle that I missed them altogether. A few were stated directly:

Calvin says: "If you see, you're going to get popped in a fair fight, don't fight fair.... It's like society, don't you see? They got all these rules that everybody's supposed to play by. But sometimes you see that those rules are going to cut you up. That makes you a bandit. You're a smart bandit when you know you don't have to play that game no more."

The counselor says, about Laura and Howie, "'They might be developing a dependency which would interfere with their resocialization later.'" [Laura's mom's] "own intuition was that if you found someone you liked and trusted, you held on for dear life." show less

I was prepared for another depressing book about teenagers suffering, and I was pleasantly surprised that this book was different. It was still a formulaic story about two kids at a summer camp who are bullied, but the compelling writing and shifting of perspective from kid world to adult world were so great that it was way better than just a typical bullying story. Goats perfectly captures the world of kids that exists below adults' radar, and how hard it can be for kids to prevail over the show more combination of power-trips and clueless-ness in adults who have control over them. Kids who don't even know each other, with hardly any money or food are better able to care for each other than the adults in their lives.

Goats takes place in the eighties, and some of the parts where white kids and black kids are hanging out are weird - the author makes a point of declaring which kids are white and which are black in a way that is pretty awkward. I flinched at the stereotyping of all the kids at times. However, the awesomeness of the characters came through and the suspense of the story was great. show less