Green scum is the trouble! This book is the second in the series and starts off just exactly where the first book, Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo, left off. It is the summer holidays, Lockie, a super-surfer, is thirteen, friendless and without a girl. Then one day on the beach he meets Egg (short fo... more

Green scum is the trouble! This book is the second in the series and starts off just exactly where the first book, Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo, left off. It is the summer holidays, Lockie, a super-surfer, is thirteen, friendless and without a girl. Then one day on the beach he meets Egg (short for Eggleston). Egg is a bogan. Bogans dress in black, love heavy metal music, don't swim and traditionally are enemies of surfers. Lockie persuades Egg to go kayaking with him in the calm water of Angelus Harbour. To their horror the boys find that the harbour is covered in green scum and stinks to high heaven. The trouble seems to be coming from a large industrial pipe outlet. Right at this point Lockie and Egg get angry. As you can tell from the above paragraph this story has a strong environmentalism theme. It is also about judging people and looking beyond outward appearances, labels and fashions. Family life and divorce also feature as secondary themes. Unlike the first novel, religion and morality only get a very minor mention. This book is written by an Australian author and was first published back in 1993. Once again Winton has made the mistake of including lots of Australian cultural references, many of which have dated and are now obscure to even to Australian teenagers. This is a real pity as the story is excellent and certainly still relevant to twenty-first-century living. Winton writes in a witty, enthusiastic style that makes these books quite addictive. The author has included enough new angles to make this story original, but it does suffer slightly from the 'play-it-again syndrome' that many sequels are afflicted with. I therefore recommend that the reader not pick up this book immediately after reading the first one. If you wait the memory of the first book will not be quite so emblazoned on the mind and you will not bore. This is basically a good book for young teens and the young at heart.