The Trouble With Goats and Sheep

I was having a search through my reviews for authors I’d said that I’d watch out for again and Joanna Cannon’s name came up and I found this one lurking in the library. I read Three Things About Elsie a few years back and really enjoyed the unreliable narrator mechanic of a mystery being handled by the narrator suffering from dementia.

This book is set in the heatwave of 1976 and it felt rather bizarre to find the dates on the page being exactly fifty years to the day before I was reading it. But a nice coincidence. The setting is an estate of semi-detached houses named after trees: Pine Close, Rowan Tree Croft etc. This made me laugh because in the summer of 1976 I was living in a semi-detached house in Chestnut Way. So although I don’t really remember a lot about that summer (I was quite young!) I didn’t have any trouble picturing the setting. I did think it a bit odd that the cul-de-sac where most of the book was set was called The Avenue, I would have expected something named an avenue to have two ends but I went to Google Maps and the first results I found for “The Avenue” were in fact cul-de-sacs. So there you go, total authenticity on the setting!

The book starts when one of the street’s residents has unexpectedly vanished. A lot of the book is narrated by ten year old Grace who goes around with her friend Tilly attempting to find out what’s happened to her neighbour. These are intertwined with sections looking at the situation from the viewpoints of other residents, and some of these delve back in time to events surrounding a fire in the close a few years before.

I really enjoyed it for much the same reasons as I enjoyed Three Things About Elsie, which is nice. Though it’s not a crime novel style mystery (and the lack of formula is in it’s favour in my opinion) it has a very mystery-ish feel to it as you get to figure out what’s going on as the book advances. Grace made a great narrator - being a child she was able to see what all the grown ups did and report it but not always understand it herself which left the reader to join the dots up, follow the undercurrents, and work out what was happening. And by the end of the book you understand exactly what’s going on. It’s really entertaining but there’s a seriousness lurking underneath it all.

I’m pleased to see that Joanna Cannon has written at least one other novel and that’s on my to-find list now and I hope that there are more.