By Jeanne Willis
Two young goats get hold of a phone, decide a troll has it coming, and send messages they can't take back.
Billy Goat and his friend Cyril find the farmer's mobile phone lying about and do what anyone their age would do with it. They take selfies. They play games. Then they find a troll's number in it, and they remember Grandpa Gruff saying trolls are bad, so they start sending him messages. Rude ones. Really rude ones. It's hilarious right up until they decide to sneak into the cave and snap a photo of the troll to post online for everyone to laugh at, and they find a very small troll sitting there crying, because she has been reading every single thing they sent. The goats had forgotten she was a someone. The last few pages are them working out how to fix it.
Almost every book about being mean online is written for the child getting hurt. This one is written for the child doing the hurting, and it never once wags a finger at them. Billy and Cyril aren't villains. They're funny, ordinary, egging each other on, sure they're on the right side because a grown-up told them trolls are bad. Your child will be laughing along with them, which means your child is the one caught out when the cave door opens. It lands because it is funny first. And at five or six, long before there's a phone in the house, this is the whole idea in thirty-two pages: there is a real person on the other end, and you can't see them cry.