Hijacked by Goats
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Sept 8, 2026
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The moving story of a girl struggling with OCD—the bully hijacking her brain—who gets the help she needs to push back.
Josie arrives at Bryce Haven Psychiatric Hospital sure that she’s a bad person and a bad friend. She must be, because her brain constantly yells at her for not being good enough. It tells her she needs to be perfect or else she’ll be alone and miserable forever. She’s so overwhelmed with worries about bad things happening as punishment for her imperfections that she sometimes feels compelled to punish herself.
Then, when Josie gets discharged and returns home, she’s forced to deal with Hal—the mean, smelly bully of a goat her dad is goat-sitting. Hal has a bad habit of climbing where he shouldn’t and refusing to get out of the way.
When Josie’s therapist diagnoses her with OCD, describing it as a bully in her brain, Josie denies it. Surely her brain is just trying to be helpful . . . right? But eventually, she begins to see that her OCD bears a striking resemblance to Hal, so maybe she shouldn’t feel guilty about wanting to kick it out. With her therapist’s help and the support of her dad and friends, Josie might finally be ready to stand up to the bully in her brain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A middle schooler navigates her recently diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder in this affirming story from Braden (Into the Rapids). Because of feeling that she's "responsible for.... Everything bad that's happened," artistic Josie Martinez constantly worries that she's a bad person. When intrusive thoughts prompt self-harm ("I needed to be punished"), Jo's single father admits her to Upstate New York's Bryce Haven Psychiatric Hospital for treatment. There, she learns that she has OCD, and that it's been exacerbating her already overwhelming feelings of anxiety and depression. Throughout her stay, Jo grows close to soccer fanatic Phoebe, a fellow patient who's working on managing her anger; faces uncomfortable emotions during a group therapy performance of Matilda; and acquires adaptive coping strategies. Still, she loathes the thought of returning to life outside the hospital, especially after Dad agrees to care for Hal, a family friend's antagonistic goat. But with support from Phoebe, Dad, and her therapist, Jo determines to stand up to corporeal goat Hal and the "giant bully of a goat called OCD." Lucid metaphor unspools across short chapters, conveyed via Jo's self-effacing yet increasingly assured first-person POV. The result is a brief and empowering look at one girl's managing mental health challenges. Ages 10–up.
