The Goats

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 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 show more 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

I read this book primarily because it has been one of the most challenged books in American libraries, and I'm always interested in reading challenged and banned books. The Goats tells the story of two teens, referred to mainly as "the boy" and "the girl" through most of the book, who are the victims of a cruel and humiliating camp prank. They are stripped and left for the night on a small island, a camp tradition that involves choosing two "goats." In a courageous move, however, they choose to make their way off of the island and disappear. I think that I would have appreciated the book more if I had read it as a teenager. The sense of isolation, hopelessness and embarrassment which I remember so well from my own adolescence were very show more well written, and tempered with the tentative happiness from finding a friend who understands you. The book does show its age, primarily through cultural references like breakdancing teens, but the story itself still feels relevant to me. Teens who don't mind reading older books would likely enjoy this story of two misfits searching for their place in the world.

As far as the banning/challenging is concerned, it seems to me that the likely censorship premise centers around nudity. Since both teens were stripped and abandoned, they spend a large portion of the beginning of the book nude or in makeshift clothing. In addition, their predicament leads them to become very close very quickly, often holding hands and sleeping together for warmth. The nudity and closeness are not, in my opinion, sensationalist, casual, or really all that sexual in nature. I found The Goats to be entirely appropriate for its teenage audience. 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, 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

I have learned not to underestimate “young adult” or “children’s” books. So far, almost all of them I have read so far have been amazing—many of them more poignant and thought-provoking than most “adult” novels I have come across.

This one wasn’t as deep as books such as The Chocolate War or Fade, but it is still not one to be underestimated. It shows how some kids can be so thoughtless and cruel, with no forethought of how their actions might affect others.

This story revolves around a pair of teenagers—actually, no, I think they might be pre-teens…--who are victims of a yearly “prank” at a summer camp. They’re confused and scared and angry… and they don’t want the other campers to win. So they rely on show more themselves instead of waiting for help from the adults who were supposed to be watching over them.

It’s touching, seeing these kids form a relationship under such circumstances, watching them do things they normally would never do in order to feed and clothe themselves. Good story. show less

What was the point of this book? Kids book...no big finish......no moral. What was the point?! Ok, that wasn't a fair assessment. The writing was actually pretty good...lots of build up and suspense. But someone forgot to tell the author that the book had to come to an end...and when she figured that out, she just kind of did a "oh, then everything was all right..." No explanation, no moral, no clean up. What a waste!

This is an ALA recommended book, and usually I like their suggestions, but I really, really didn't like this book. I found it boring and slow, and even the font was aggravating. Not often that I give a book such a low rating, but this really, really did nothing for me, which is surprising because I liked the premise of the book. It just was not a good read for me. Would not recommend it to anyone.

A boy and a girl are each marooned on an island as a camp prank, and they escape before their tormentors can return the next day and take them back to camp. They decide to go on the run, and cause the camp a bit of anxiety about their disappearance.