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Mar 20, 2019DW_kcls rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
I am sharply conflicted about "The Trouble with Goats and Sheep". On one hand, I adored the story of the young, pre-teen girls, trying to make sense of their world by looking for Jesus and trying to sort His sheep and goats. I think the writing of "The Trouble with Goats and Sheep" in regard to the girls is vivid and absolutely superb: "... because I knew my mother was sometimes perfectly capable of embroidering a whole evening of arguing out of absolutely nothing at all." Regarding the library: "After my bedroom, this was my favorite place in the world. It was carpeted, and had heavy bookcases and ticking clocks and velvet chairs, just like someone's living room. It smelled of unturned pages and unseen adventures, and on every shelf were people I had yet to meet, and places I had yet to visit. Each time, I lost myself in the corridors of books and polished, wooden rooms, deciding which journey to go on next." At a funeral looking for a hint where to find Jesus: "I stared past the vicar to Enid's coffin, and thought of the ninety-eight years which lay inside. I wondered if she'd thought of them too, alone on her sitting room carpet, and I hoped perhaps that she had. I thought about how she'd be carried from the church and through the graveyard, past all the Ernests and the Mauds and the Mabels, and how ninety-eight years would be put inside the ground, for dandelions to grow across her name. I thought about the people who would forever walk past her, on their way to somewhere else. People at weddings and christenings. People taking a shortcut, having a cigarette. I wondered if I would ever stop and think about Enid and her ninety-eight years, and I wondered if the world would have a little remembering left for her." Regarding sorting the goats and sheep: "But I don't understand," whispered Tilly. "How does God know which people are goats and which people are sheep?" . . . "I think that's the trouble," I said, it's not always that easy to tell the difference." On the other hand, I hated every single adult in the story. I hated attempting to get to know them and the tortured, laborious writing about them, their secrets and their slights, real, imagined and all blown out of proportion. Their combined story and their individual stories veered off into far too many blind alleys and made the whole thing a tangled yarn of words difficult to read and about which it became impossible for me to care. I'm having trouble reconciling such exquisite writing with such an awful sub-story. It took me 10 days (TEN DAYS!) to read "The Trouble with Goats and Sheep". Thank God I'm finally done with it.