Brock Cole

Look at the different covers. Depending on how you read it, where you are in your life, what your expectations are, this can fit any of them. It's an adventure about two kids on their own. It's a companion to [b:Lord of the Flies|7624|Lord of the Flies|William Golding|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327869409s/7624.jpg|2766512]. It's poetically written *L*iterature with a quest and grand metaphysical themes. You choose.

Though I actually read the one with just the uninhabited lake shore, I'm recording the blue and pink, with Laura in the pink shirt and Howie sitting on the ground. To me, the characters were more important than any deep literary symbolism. The blue for boy, pink for girl, are easy symbols, and that's the level I read this book on. The way they're self-absorbed, looking in different directions but still very aware of each other, is key to my understanding of the book.

One could go deeper, and consider the title Goats and the goat smell in the deputy's pickup, the reason the girl was so helpless at first and the boy quite resourceful, the reason Lockwood kept the IOU instead of accepting payment, the fact that just about the only people who weren't evil were some of the Black inner-city campers, the abrupt ending, etc. I recommend doing so if you're up to it, for example if you choose this book for a book report for school.

Some of the ideas explored here are surely so subtle that I missed them altogether. A few were stated directly:

Calvin says: "If you see, you're going to get popped in a fair fight, don't fight fair.... It's like society, don't you see? They got all these rules that everybody's supposed to play by. But sometimes you see that those rules are going to cut you up. That makes you a bandit. You're a smart bandit when you know you don't have to play that game no more."

The counselor says, about Laura and Howie, "'They might be developing a dependency which would interfere with their resocialization later.'" [Laura's mom's] "own intuition was that if you found someone you liked and trusted, you held on for dear life."… (more)