Review: The Goats

The Goats by Brock Cole
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I started reading The Goats, by Brock Cole, I kept thinking "Wow, this reminds me a lot of the YA fiction stuff I read when I was a kid." Eventually, I checked the publication date, and, sure enough, it was published in 1987. The premise: A boy and a girl, both 13, end up being ditched on a small island, with no clothes or food, by their co-campers as part of a traditional camp prank. Embarrassed, afraid, and lonely, the two kids decide to try to escape from the island, rather than wait for their tormentors to return.

There is a sense of naiveté here that I strongly associate with 80s/early 90s YA lit. Some of it is cringe-worthy—a character concerned about sleeping in the same bed as another girl because “the black girl was so big, and she’d never touched a black person’s skin”—but most of the time, I found the innocence of the two characters more charming than not. This is a story about kids who are just starting to cross the bridge into adulthood, but they’re mostly just kids. And, in a lot of ways, they’re kids like I was a kid: a little awkward, a little picked on, a little confused by why things are the way they are.

One of the best parts of The Goats is the very organic way that Cole lets the kids, Howie and Laura, become close. The gradual way that they come to not only rely on, but trust and like each other, is very well executed. There’s not really any one particular moment where you can say “Oh, hey, they’re friends now.” Instead, there’s a continuum; at one end, they’re strangers who resent and distrust each other, at the other, they’re close friends who’ve overcome a unique and intense situation.

As much as I enjoyed this book, I wonder whether today’s youth would enjoy it as much, given the lack of nostalgia it would hold for them. Are the characters just a little too innocent for today’s world? Would the lack of cell phones be too jarring to kids who are so much more checked in than my generation was?

Amusingly, when I checked this out from the library, there was a small sticky note just inside the front of the book. At least some other reader found a lot in this book to chew on, so maybe it’s not all nostalgia, after all?


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