The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is a quirky and endearing coming-of-age novel with a dash of mystery. It’s set in a small middle-class community in a typical English housing estate, and narrated by a young girl named Grace. It’s wonderfully written, brimming with lovely analogies and metaphors, many of which raise a smile, but which also serve to give Grace’s voice and perspective a certain authenticity.
Spanning almost a decade between 1967 and 1976, the story is told in part by Grace and filled in with third-person narration capturing the various perspectives of the estate’s ‘grown-ups’ about past and present events. One event in particular, a kidnapping of a baby from the estate many years prior, is at the centre of the story, and still very much lives at the forefront of the residents’ minds and still evokes a collective guilt for a crime committed under their noses.
The sensitive and insightful way with which the author invented the complex cast of characters who call The Avenue home, is perhaps indicative of her studies in psychiatry and her intimate knowledge of the human psyche, but also reveals a stunning ability to bring it all to life in rich and vivid colour.
She captures perfectly the nature of those small, cramped communities which, as one of the main characters Mrs Morton describes, is “a parade of people, joined together by tedium and curiosity, passing other people’s misery around between themselves like a parcel”. Just one of many wonderful lines.
During a heat wave in the summer of 1976 one of the residents of The Avenue disappears without a trace. While the police investigate, and the grown-ups offer their myriad own theories regarding the disappearance, Grace and her best friend Tilly decide that the only obvious solution as far as they can see is to find God, who, as the vicar states, is the only one who can keep everyone else in The Avenue safe.
It is during their door-to-door search for God that they are confronted with the trouble of how to distinguish between ‘goats and sheep’ which, according to the vicar, forms the basis of who will be saved and who will be condemned.
Through the eyes of the two young girls and their experiences on the estate, Cannon cleverly weaves a complex novel about friendship, loyalty, choices, secrets, memories, love and the virtues of listening.
Her debut novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is utterly enjoyable and I very much look forward to reading more by Cannon.
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