The Goats by Brock Cole
My rating: 3/5 cats
teen survival?? kids trying to get out of the woods after a practical joke goes wrong?? or “goes according to plan but sucks, for them”?? sign me up!! i saw this when i was volunteering my time at the library, and instead of taking it out like a normal person, i just ordered it into the store and bought it. good for the store, bad for the library. and then i get home to this desperate email from the queens library system that says because there have been more budget cuts, they can’t order any new books. zero. seriously?? that is insane. i assume you guys are all like me—penniless book lovers, but if one of you is a secret millionaire, here is your chance to be a star!!
https://secure2.convio.net/qlf/site/D…
go ahead, it will make me feel less guilty about having bought this book, instead of improving circulation stats and proving that the library is a valuable part of our community. sorry, queens…
but this is what happens when they slap a modern-looking cover on an old YA book: i get fooled. this was the old cover for the book, and its visual tone is much more accurate to the book than the creepier-looking modern one:
i would never have read this book with this cover, even in my less-judgmental youth.
so the book was fine, but it really suffers from a lot of the flaws of the YA books of my youth and that’s a big part of why i assumed, before my immersion into it, that contemporary YA fiction was bad. it is not—it has come a long way, baby. but this book—this is the YA heroine of my youth. she literally says: “Oh, God, I need somebody to take care of me,” while rolling on the ground, crying.
wow.
i am so sorry, young girls of 1987. you deserved better. it’s true that she gets more capable as the novel progresses, but that first chapter when she is just crying and snotting and wailing, contrasted with the resigned and resourceful young boy—it just put me off a little.
however, there are so many parts of this book that were ahead of its time, and this has been a frequently challenged book. it managed to piss a lot of people off with material that is pretty tame by today’s standards, but there are still tons of parts that date it hopelessly.
the basic plot is that two loserish kids at a summer camp get punked: they are taken to an island, stripped and abandoned. this is unspoken camp tradition, and it is meant to encourage a little bwamp chicka bwamp in these thirteen-year-old kids. which doesn’t happen, obviously, because no thirteen-year-old kid is sexually jaded enough to bang some stranger because of bullies and camp traditions. even if the girl already has pubic hair “like a Hitler mustache.”
so instead, they go on a voyage of discovery, trying to get back to camp and safety, and becoming friends in the process. i liked parts of the book, but i would never go out of my way to recommend it to anyone. read it if you want, it’s no meat off my sandwich. just don’t expect it to be as good as most YA stuff written today. the lines are blurring, like it or not…
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