THE TROUBLE WITH GOATS AND SHEEP by JOANNA CANNON

THE TROUBLE WITH GOATS AND SHEEP

BY JOANNA CANNON

THE BLURB:-

Mrs Creasy is missing and The Avenue is alive with whispers. As the summer shimmers endlessly on, ten-year-olds Grace and Tilly decide to take matters into their own hands.

But as doors and mouths begin to open and the cul-de-sac starts giving up its secrets, the amateur detectives will find more than they could have imagined...

THE REALITY:-

I didn't have the luxury of being able to read through this work quickly, as nowadays I have a lot of other things on- namely my MA course, as well as work, my blogging about tourist attractions, and my SuperDean, which all eat into my time.

Perhaps it's because of this busyness that I lost the thread a little, and would maybe benefit from going back and re-reading this book at some point. This novel didn't come across as a story- more of a soap opera, with different chains of events interlinking. The ending was a disappointment, and it was never really explained why Mrs Creasy went missing. I did, however, like the twist in the story, when we find out that (spoiler alert!) it was really sad Mrs Morton who, when dealing with immense grief (for what her life could have been, more than for her recently deceased husband), stole Grace when she was just a baby. I also like the way she managed to pin the blame on someone else (incidentally, I always felt sorry for Walter Bishop; that “someone else”) and get out of her crime by announcing that she'd actually been the one to find Grace. Very clever writing.

Similes and metaphors abounded and some were interesting, such as “His toes were doing a little dance in his sandals. Like piano keys”. And “kneading stoicism into a thick pastry and measuring out spoonfuls of endurance for the mixing bowl”. But I do think there were possibly too many of them, and some I didn't understand. For instance, what does it mean when someone “fire-engined himself out” and “pin pricks started at the side of the saucepan”? If you're going to use phrases like this, make sure they're something someone will understand (or maybe I'm just thick...)

It was easy to relate to the life described in this novel as I was a kid in the 1970s (although a few years younger than Grace and Tilly- incidentally, I loved the latter character). I also like the analogy that the good people are sheep (but does that also mean that they follow the flock? Not so admirable) and that bad people are goats. The conversations held with the vicar also made me take a look at my own (rather lacking ) spirituality, and that's not such a bad thing.

I bought this at an open day at the Ilford Hospital Chapel, and it's certainly a book I'd recommend (mainly because the 1967 parts differentiated from the 1976 parts in that they are written in the third person present tense, and I'm currently working on something constructed in the same way, so it was good learning material for me)- it just didn't blow me away.