Mocky's Revinge: A Novelette [Hardcover]

Mark Louis Lehman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2005

Combining tart humor, playful language, and a serious moral dimension, this unusual novelette depicts the growing friendship between just-turning-eight Carrie Ann Watson and her Uncle Mocky, a wry, gentle, and openly gay French teacher who has returned to his home town to reconcile with his dying father. Set in the mid 1980s, the story is told as a "novel" written by Carrie herself, complete with all her linguistic idiosyncrasies and unvarnished candor. The result is funny and touching, but hardly an idealized portrait of childhood as a state of grace.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Imagine cartoonist Lynda Barry rewriting Tobacco Road, and you'll have a decent idea of what Lehman, a retired University of Cincinnati freshman comp instructor, is trying to achieve in his debut novella. "Revenge" in the title is misspelled because the story is narrated by soon-to-be-eight Little Carrie, who mangles the English language phonetically and otherwise. Carrie lives with her mother and older sister in a small town in Ohio. (Little Possum is based in Cincinnati.) A visit from Carrie's uncle Mocky and her mother's marriage to an aspiring auto restorer drive the action: Mocky is a gay French prof, and the stepfather is an angry, bigoted loser with a chip on his shoulder. The story is as slender as the book—Carrie adores her uncle and despises her new father—but Lehman does a charming job presenting Carrie, whose sister is a "pre-Madonna" and whose stepfather "reeks havick where ever he goes." (Feb.)
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From Booklist

The pen, albeit a youthful, relatively unlettered one, still proves mightier than the sword in Lehman's fiction debut written from the perspective, complete with misunderstandings, partial understandings (shot through with astonishing insights), and misspellings, of eight-year-old Carrie in small-town southern Ohio. Lehman's stylistic decision (borrowed, perhaps, from Alice Walker, who handled it with greater delicacy and fluency), especially in the misspellings, rather slows the narrative and may irritate some readers: "chocklit icing . . . cake crums and bloons . . . samwitch and pretzels." Whew! Still, the book has charm, as Uncle Mocky, a gay, 40-year-old professor of French from Columbus, visits his hometown to see his dying father and forges a deep bond with his precocious young niece only to have it shattered by his sister's redneck boyfriend's drunken, homophobic cruelty. Carrie, though painfully naive in some ways, is no one's innocent and is a fine antidote, if any is still needed, to the kind of idealized child-narrator who used to spoil even the best storytelling. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 125 pages
• Publisher: Little Possum Press; 1 edition (December 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977032620
• ISBN-13: 978-0977032624
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,617,086 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deceptively simple and very moving, January 24, 2006

By 

W. Simmons (Port Chester, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mocky's Revinge: A Novelette (Hardcover)

I found this short novel to be haunting and deeply moving, with a remarkable sensitivity to the inner world and mode of expression of a child. Two other items came to mind as I was reading it: A Death in the Family, by James Agee, and the film Slingblade. Lehman uses the idiosyncratic spelling of an 8-year-old to convey the mind of a child; this and the regional dialect provide an interesting and amusing dimension, but they are really only a small aspect of its impact as a whole. The whole issue of revenge and the question of whether one can gain from it the satisfaction often used to justify it is quite a profound matter, and one that is always relevant. I was just describing the book to a friend of mine this morning, and as I was talking I realized how much substance and detail there was to it despite its brevity. I sincerely hope that it reaches even a small portion of its potential audience, as I am sure a broad range of readers would react as I have.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Revinge" is So Sweet, July 26, 2006

By 

Stephen Ellis (Glenview, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mocky's Revinge: A Novelette (Hardcover)

Author Lehmann's narrator, Carrie Ann Watson, is the beleaguered, resourceful, emotional, touching nearly 8-year-old who's moved to write this story of the summer that her "outsider," big-city Uncle Mocky came to her small Ohio town to visit his dying father, her grandfather. This unforgettable novelette is made even more personal by the narrator's take-no-prisoners approach to spelling; if she's heard a word, she can spell it. For instance, you'll meet her older sister, Mariah, a "pre-Madonna too busy to play with her little sister," and the book's title is not a typo but pure Carrie wrestling with grown-up words. The spelling mishaps are often puns--offering some gamesmanship, as I struggled a few times to get the meaning and wouldn't go on until I had unlocked the words. But it's the simple but insightful narrator you'll always remember. As I read, I kept wondering what Uncle Mocky's "revinge" was going to be, and when you learn Carrie's part in it, you might fear that this tender-yet-tough kid might be a Bad Seed in the making. But I say not to worry, for devilish though it may be, there is a poignant denouement (what would Carrie do to that word?) for Mocky and Carrie. This "novel written by an 8-year-old" is an understandably short book--but one long on resonance.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars happy with mocky, March 3, 2008

By 

smart shopper (indiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mocky's Revinge: A Novelette (Hardcover)

good read. very diff. style of writing, but creatively done. endearing characters you will think about and relate to. a great first effort by the author.