Review: Lockie Leonard Human Torpedo

Last week marked the first week that I had officially read Lockie Leonard Human Torpedo from cover to cover, despite the fact that I was assigned to read it in my year nine English class. The first time around, I was fourteen years old, and resentful of the fact that the class had to one, read a book that had a boy as its main character (oh, how dreadful,) and two, that it was a realistic read set in contemporary Australia, rather than well, anywhere else during any other point in history. (Not bad for someone whose later academic career focused exclusively on Australian Literature ... and who included Tim Winton in their English Honours thesis.) Plus the feminist in me was annoyed that some of the other kids in my class kept calling Vicki Streeton a slut, when I felt that she was just as confused about things as Lockie, only in a different way. Consequently, I ended up skipping lots of bits and got a B for my assignment on the book.

I found a copy of Lockie Leonard Human Torpedo at my local secondhand bookstore recently and I decided to read it, properly, this time, and to see what I could make of it. The truth is, it's not a bad book for teens. And I still think it was unfair of the kids in my English class to label Vicki a slut. 

Lockie Leonard is almost thirteen years old, is the oldest of three kids and has just moved to a small town in Western Australia, where his dad will be working as the local Sergeant. A bullying incident on his first day of school sees his nether regions covered in Vegemite, and it also leads him to Vicki Streeton, the streetwise daughter of the local used car salesman, who becomes Lockie's first girlfriend. Lockie likes Vicki, a lot, but she's also a bit too keen to grow up, and continually pushes the boundaries of their relationship. The moral to the story is a good one--about letting kids be kids, and the way that Lockie treats Vicki is commendable. There are also a lot of amusing glimpses into surf culture and life in a small town.

I enjoyed this one a lot more than I expected to and will probably hunt down the sequels.

PS Random trivia: Although the specific year is never given, there are several hints that the story is set in 1988--for example the death of a key character on Neighbours is mentioned. 

This book was read as part of the Aussie Author Challenge 2017

Comments

Anonymous said…
I'm in year 7 (12 years old) and my class is doing an essay on it. personally I think its very inappropriate as we are not even teens yet. Our teacher read the book to us including all the yucky scenes and the swear words.
12 September 2021 at 21:28
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more