Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I finished listening to Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble with Goats and Sheep today, and it was odd.  It was also (by turns) hilarious, poignant, disturbing, and unexpected.  What it never was, certainly, was boring.

It is the summer of 1976, there’s a heat wave in England, and Mrs. Creasy has disappeared.  The whole street is speculating; 10-year-olds Grace and Tilly decide to go looking for God, in order to keep themselves and their neighbors safe, while the adults around them start to point fingers at the local recluse, a man whom everyone is sure is a pervert and a danger to them all.  As the summer progresses, however, the neighbors’ lives are exposed to us–one by one–and a clear picture of the situation becomes increasingly more difficult to grasp.  Many of Cannon’s characters aren’t exactly lovable, but (for the most part) we aren’t allowed to dismiss any of them as simply bad; instead, Cannon (a psychiatrist by profession) gives us a cast full of imperfect human beings, whose choices (even the terrible ones) can be traced to reasons that made sense to them.  (The one exception is Grace’s worst choice of the novel, which seemed extreme to me.)  There’s an element of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, here, among many other things, but the ending is far more nebulous.  (I wanted more resolution, although I can appreciate why it was left where it was.)  The timing of the storm at the end felt contrived to me, but overall, this is an atmospheric, quirky book that’s likely to stick with you far longer than you might have expected.  Let me know what you think!