Lockie Leonard Books in Order

Lockie Leonard is a surf-mad teenager who’s forever getting knocked sideways by life. When his police-officer dad moves the family to Angelus, a small coastal town in Western Australia, Lockie has to start high school in a place where nobody knows him and the house is slowly sinking into a swamp.

In Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo, he’s twelve-and-three-quarters, hopelessly in love with clever, glamorous Vicki Streeton and painfully aware of how strange his family looks from the outside. Between a poetry-quoting cop for a father, an endlessly patient mum and a little brother who still wets the bed, Lockie ricochets between wild happiness in the surf and total embarrassment on land.

Beneath the jokes, the first book nails that awkward mix of bravado and confusion that comes with being new, noticed and not quite ready.

Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster picks up after his first romance has crashed and burned. Lockie is lonely until he befriends Egg, the heavy-metal-loving son of the local minister, and the two stumble on proof that their town’s biggest employer is polluting the bay they both love. Their clumsy, funny campaign to clean things up turns the series toward environmental questions without ever losing the scruffy humour.

In Lockie Leonard, Legend, the so-called normal year he’s been hoping for never really arrives. His little brother’s hormones kick in, his baby sister eats anything that isn’t nailed down, his parents behave in ways he doesn’t fully understand, and school brings fresh dramas. As Lockie tries to hang onto his place in the pecking order, he starts to see that real “legend” status has more to do with loyalty and honesty than with being the coolest kid on the beach.

Across the trilogy the tone stays quick, irreverent and grounded in surf slang, but the stories quietly track bigger shifts in family, friendship, sexuality and the way a small town treats its land and water.

Read in order, the Lockie Leonard books let you watch him grow from a wide-eyed newcomer to someone who understands his town and himself a little better. They’re especially good for readers in the middle-school and early high-school years who want something funny and frank that still takes their worries seriously.