Lockie is a bit of a misfit. Orphaned, he is placed in foster home after foster home, but somehow he never settles in. 'Troublemaker' is the general verdict.
He runs away and meets up with some colourful characters - Dadge and his strange friends Pasha and Mammy Tallon. For the first time Lockie doesn't feel like an outsider.
But others are out to wreck his happiness.
Frank Murphy is a retired school principal, living in Cork. His teaching career, which began in Dublin, took him also to north Wexford, and eventually to Cork city.
He has written stories, non-fiction pieces and poetry in Irish and English. Most of his work has appeared in school books in Ireland and the UK, with some stories also included in anthologies of children's fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.
Compelling ... will apeal to anyone who likes adventure
Echo
a well-written and warmhearted story ... populated with the quirky and irrepressible
Children's Books in Ireland
Robert Dunbar - Children's Books in Ireland
Beguiling and engaging ... should keep young teenagers enthralled.
The Irish Times
The satisfaction of a really enjoyable read.
The Sunday Tribune
I have been credited with inventing characters who are eccentric ... All my 'eccentrics' are people who live on the edge of society, cast in peripheral roles by conventional attitudes.
They are, however, free from the demands of any creed or political philosophy and do not have to conform to anyone else's judgement of what is proper. The difference between the way they treat Lockie and the way he is treated by those with full membership of society is that the 'beatniks' take Lockie as they find him, while the others have an evangelical zeal to make him match their own blueprint. Lockie is a free spirit and he finds soul mates in the 'eccentrics'.
The author, writing in Children's Books in Ireland
The Author Speaks
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