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This was certainly an incredibly interesting novel! It is certainly thought-provoking and gets the reader thinking about morals, forgiveness and deceit. It is bizarre because in some ways, I thought this book was incredibly accomplished…in some places however, I thought it was completely and utterly bonkers!

The Trouble With Goats and Sheep is Joanna Cannon’s debut novel and despite the 3-star rating, I think it is very impressive for a debut! It is set in Britain during the summer of 1976 which, I believe, was the hottest summer ever recorded in the UK! Obviously, for some countries, it was not that hot but for the UK’s usual standards, it was boiling. It follows a very small avenue in which live two young girls, Grace and Tilly. One of their neighbours, Mrs. Creasy, has recently gone missing and in order to entertain themselves during this summer, they decide to investigate into Mrs. Creasy’s disappearance and try to figure out what happened. By doing so, they inadvertently unravel all the other hidden dark secrets that the people of the avenue have surreptitiously kept for many years.

What they do in order to find Mrs. Creasy is the following: they talk to the local vicar who says that God divides society into people who deserve eternal punishment (“goats”) and people who deserve eternal life (“sheep”), hence the title. The girls decide that if they can discover where God is in this avenue, they can find him and he will bring everybody together again and bring Mrs. Creasy home. Initially, this was one of the things I found most interesting about the book, even not being any sort of religious person myself, but towards the end, it was one of the things I questioned the most. (To be explained later!)

The novel then continues by giving the reader a slice of the culture in this avenue, exploring the lives of all the neighbours, as well as their consciences, secrets, and certain things they want to hide and keep safe from knowledge. Tension rises in the avenue (as does the heat) when Mrs. Creasy’s disappearance threatens to bring up a past which the residents of the avenue would much prefer not being brought up. So not only does this novel have a sense of being a literary fiction, considering how it is a commentary on the culture and society in this avenue, but it also has elements of a mystery in it as more secrets are being revealed and in how the reader is constantly kept guessing throughout the book. Themes are introduced too such as love, self-realisation, conscience, guilt…all of those themes really get the reader thinking!

There were some things I really enjoyed about this book! It is an incredibly easy read – nice big font makes it fairly easy to plough through the pages – and the writing style is very cosy and British. Throughout the beginning stages of reading it, the word I was using to constantly describe how I felt about the book was “calming”. It is certainly that! This is the sort of writing style that you can slip into and become very swept up in. The main character’s personality came across perfectly in her first person narration, for example! Additionally, some scenes I thought were just brilliantly written and the writing style gave the book the air of being a terrific literary fiction. Another thing I really enjoyed was the pacing: this book is extremely slow-paced. The plot is certainly a focus in this book, considering it is partly a mystery, but the slow pace of the novel allows the book to focus on the society too and focus on a lot of detail, as many great literary fiction novels do.

Considering that this is NOT a short book (my edition being 453 pages) and considering that it was very slow-paced, I never thought at any point that it was too long. Joanna Cannon managed to keep me fairly boredom-free throughout the fairly substantial length: a very good sign!

Bizarrely, although I usually like mystery novels, the mystery elements were by no means the parts of the book I was most interested in. Yes, alright, you somewhat want to know what happened to Mrs. Creasy but that is not the part I was most interested in: I was more interested in the characters’ journeys of self-realisation throughout and how a harsh look on their morals is forcibly brought to the surface after Mrs. Creasy’s disappearance. Another thing that really captured my interest was just the slow and steadily paced look on a British society. Just reading that was relaxing and delightful enough to the point where the plot was not overly relevant to me.

(Having said all that, the plot WILL become more relevant as the book goes on: you do not really have a choice but to really pay attention to the plot towards the latter third of the book!)

In conclusion of the positive parts, this was an easy and quick read, very cosy, very British, really slow-paced and society-focused, yet also has some intriguing elements of mystery and interesting moral themes raised by that mystery.

However, I do have a few complaints which definitely prevented me from giving this book higher than three stars.
My first complaint is that, whilst I think this is a strong debut that without doubt has merits (as explained above), it still had a small element of not overly motivating me to pick the book back up when I was not reading it. I never struggled to finish it at any point (that certainly was NOT the issue): it is just that there are some books which excite me so much that I cannot wait to get to them after finishing work and diving into them. The Trouble With Goats and Sheep did not give me that sadly: I was very much enjoying it and finding it extremely immersive when I was reading it but it never left me with a hunger to finish it off as some other books have done. I am not entirely sure why this is: maybe it is not the fault of the book! Nevertheless, it was an issue I had.

The second complaint I had was with this God business. I really enjoyed how Joanna Cannon incorporated it into the first half because the girls are walking around people’s houses in the avenue in an attempt to “find God”. They assume that God is hiding somewhere in the avenue! I very much enjoyed this part of the book because I assumed that Joanna Cannon was trying to convey the message of God being a very individual thing to believe in and how, if you do believe in him, he is an all-round entity and not to be found in a specific place. I am not a religious person myself at all but these themes were still very clearly specified in the book.

This was all blown apart in the latter quarter of the book when this God situation got so beyond ridiculous it had me absolutely cackling with laughter as I was reading: almost every single character in the book starts gathering around this drainpipe suddenly ‘seeing Jesus’ in a dried splodge of creosote on the pipe. (You read that correctly!)
I can understand if this was supposed to be a humorous part of the book or something which was supposed to DISPROVE the fact that God was on the drainpipe…but then every single character claimed that they could see Him and starts telling everyone to “come and see Christ!”. This created a juxtaposition between two very different religious messages conveyed, to the point where it became very confusing. I was thinking ‘is this a comic part of the book…oh, wait, no, she’s being serious about this’!

Then, later on, she contradicts herself again by conveying a ‘God-is-everywhere’ theme once again after all this kerfuffle! So, if that was the case, how did every single character allegedly see Jesus in this dried creosote if the eventual moral was that it wasn’t Jesus after all?

As I’ve said, I am NOT a religious person by any stretch of the imagination so maybe there is a religious allegory which I am not seeing. Yet whilst the book was still enjoyable after that point, that section of the book was just a bit too bonkers for me.

There are positives about this book! It is quick, easy, brilliantly written, very slow-paced, and very literary. The complaints I have with it were the small lack of motivation I had to pick it up and the latter quarter of the book during which everything went a bit mad!
I would still recommend this if you fancy a cosy holiday read, if you enjoy literary fiction, if you enjoy books with lots of atmosphere and with elements of mystery, and/or if you enjoy books with a very slow pace. If you are a fan of one or more of the above, this would be a good book for you!

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I continued my reading challenge by reading a nonfiction book, and decided to find something which would expand upon the themes of race and immigration I had read about in Americanah. Often when presented with the topic of racism, british people are faced with an overwhelmingly american discourse. Whilst what we find online and in the most widely discussed books is often applicable to the UK a gap is left. And it leaves a lot of space for us to excuse ourselves. “Not here,” we can say, “the police do that in america, it’s not like that here,” “White Americans do that, not us”. We think of segregation and slavery as something that touched only american shores and we learn about it as foreign history.

This view is inaccurate. Something which is plainly laid out in this expertly written beginners’ guide to racism in the UK. It shifted my view of my own country. The racism of our apset which I vaguely knew about as a blurred image of a “no dogs, no blacks, no irish” sign in the background of my vision of history was brought into sharp focus and shown to me as part of a coherent part of our history. It then ties this elegantly into our present, showing the parts of our society which we would much prefer to ignore, backed up with startling evidence.

I knew there was racism in the UK before I read this book, but i understood it as a ghost of american racism. Not as its own entity. This is a book which should be read by every citizen of the United kingdom. It provides a much needed understanding of where we really are with race and how we got here. I would recommend it to anyone.

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I am doing the ketts reading challenge and decided to start with a book by an African author. As someone who has been trying to reclaim a long lost love of fiction this was the perfect book. A compelling romance is neatly interwoven with very relevant discussion about migration, race. and national identity. The writing is near poetic in quality, it is an pleasure to read. I found the ending ever so slightly disappointing, however it was like the rest of the book, bitterly realistic in a most heartbreaking way. The main characters are flawed in ways which are so realistic, they make me feel as if i genuinely know them, their repeated errors become as frustrating as they would if done by a real life friend. I would recommend this to anyone seeking a compelling, contemporary story, which manages to be more than just a page turner.

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This book is transporting, and intriguing, with layers of mystery which draw the reader in further and further. It’s absolutely fantastic to read. The main character is easy to sympathise with as a contemporary woman, although her concerns are very much rooted in her own era. This is something I have found rare in historical fiction previously, so often it seems that either the main character stepped out of our own century, or she is so far away from our time that she is impossible to relate to. Nella Oortman is easy to become invested in and sympathise with. I wanted to step into the pages and hug her at her low moments and felt proud of her as I watched her grow. The side characters were equally well molded and their slow reveal to the reader only made the book more intriguing. I would recommend this book to any young woman my own age. The sense of being without direction that haunts the protagonist was strangely relatable to me as a woman who has just finished university and has not yet begun my career. I just hope I don’t need a supernatural craftsperson to sort me out because I haven’t heard of any in Wymondham.

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5 Stars!

This book was my Favourite Book of 2017!
It is a masterpiece and will certainly be getting a reread later this year. One of my Top 2 Favourite Novels of All Time!

Where to begin really?
Every single character was so developed and so fleshed out. They all felt so real and if you enjoy literary fiction where you can connect to the characters over the length of a large page count, this is the book for you! Their personalities are so in-depth; they just fizz off the page and into your mind so clearly.
I love Dorothea. She was absolutely phenomenal and she was always one of my favourites to read about. Another personal favourite of mine was Mary Garth: whilst everyone around her called her plain, she was a really capable spirit and assertively knew what she wanted from Fred Vincy the whole way through, as well as being strong and capable enough to make other independent but really quite difficult decisions. Lydgate, as well, was someone who the reader gets to know so well! It’s one thing maintaining one character’s personality…but to write such a vast amount of characters, develop each and every personality brilliantly and maintain ALL of those characters throughout 900 pages is a really impressive thing to do for an author. For that reason, I really respected how well George Eliot wrote all these people. I certainly will miss reading about them!

The writing style was another thing I loved. It was wonderfully written; her writing style certainly isn’t an easy writing style to read (it’s very meaty!) but it absolutely hooks you. Believe it or not, this book is a page-turner! Considering a) it’s very long and b) it’s a very slow-paced book with not much “action”, it’s incredible how much the writing and the detail completely immerses you. Throughout nearly all of it, I constantly felt that I needed to keep going and it engrossed me far more than any old ridiculous action thriller would have done. The writing style in this was glorious and so detailed; it was interesting; it was spell-binding and it made the whole experience even more glorious.

Another honourable mention goes to the story. This story keeps you completely engrossed even though there isn’t really anything seriously dramatic that happens! There is romance and conflict but it is completely kept within the boundaries of reality. You won’t be getting any exciting adventures or passionate emotion in this novel but you will get a story which you will fall in love with, which you will be there for until the final page and appreciate all the more for it being entirely believable. I know a lot of people stop reading this book halfway through and they complain that “nothing happens” and “the story’s too flat”. There is an element of truth! The story’s realistic and it is very slow (a much more positive translation of those negative reviews!) but it is captivating. You will believe me when you read it.

This book is very long but by the time I reached the end, it was such an eventful finish! I have never in living memory felt that me finishing a book was such a milestone but the fact that the book was no longer there in my life, for this one, felt like such an impact because I had been reading it for so long by that point that it had almost become part of my daily routine. I remember waking up and feeling really fresh, as if a huge part of my life had finally been completed. If you enjoy it, you will miss this book when you finish it!
I know a lot of people (including people who still loved it) thought this book was too long. Have to disagree: I am glad this book was as long as it was and I wouldn’t change that for a second.

One of the things that would be affected by this novel’s length is the intricacy: it is a book which focuses on so many themes that I don’t think would be as prominently shown had this book been shorter. It focuses on love; it focuses on marriage; it focuses on society; it focuses on elements of history; it focuses on medicine; it focuses on work; it focuses on finances; it focuses on your role in life and how you perceive it: it is about so much! All that just adds to how wonderfully intricate the book is.

Overall, I loved this book. It was such a ride: a long ride but certainly a ride that was worth it. I will, of course, be rereading this in the future (probably next year, maybe before then!) and I would recommend this to no end. If you don’t enjoy really long, paced out books that take a lot of time; if you see yourself losing patience with something like that, I would still recommend this as you might be pleasantly surprised but it may not be absolutely PERFECT for you. But please, nobody dismiss this (unless it sounds REALLY not your thing!) because I think it’s a masterpiece.