Product Description

This novel is the revenge of Lolita. It retells Nobokov's story in the half-innocent, half-sly voice of the nymphet herself. Or rather a late 1990s version of her - sassy, worryingly precocious, sexy Lucky Linderhof, who is at a juvenile detention centre, awaiting trial for murder.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #703728 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 228 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Lucky Linderhof is a 12-year-old latter-day Lolita, born of the privileged sperm club, living in New York with her affectionate but ineffectual mother who changes her lovers as quickly as she changes her designer clothes. Abandoned by her father, Lucky seeks a symbolic replacement from amongst her mother's boyfriends. When the piranha lodger Roger Fishbite moves in, the ironically named Lucky Lady ends up with a father-figure who becomes a lover.

Funny and surreal, Roger Fishbite has the stylistic atmosphere of Angela Carter in Disneyland for the millennium. The novel develops into a satirical, nightmarish adventure and, along the way, a hilarious parody of American consumerism from a child's point of view. As Fishbite drags Lucky from one seamy motel to another, her prepubescent sexual fantasies give way to the brittle survival instincts of the abused child. Emily Prager has modernised Nabokov's original by giving her child-heroine a voice:

"Was I in love with Fishbite? Sometimes, when the light hit his shoulder blade in a certain way, or he made a game of chasing me down one of the empty corridors or at a mall when he was paying at the register, I could forget the iniquity and a wave of warmth would rush over me and I'd have to kiss him ... But that was apart from the sex, you see, which was in a box somewhere off by itself."

Lucky is as sassy as "Fishy" is disgusting and her final revenge is a discordant symphony of mayhem and murder. Her story, "the real pain of moral children forced to live under morally indifferent grown-ups." --Rachel Holmes

---

Customer Reviews

He Got It Coming !
I'm not really sure what I was expecting from this book, the cover gives the story guide as "Lolita's revenge" so I suppose it was fairly obvious. The book was partly written in a diarised form and in my opinion the `predator male' - Roger, was not so much a paedophile as the `sweet little girl' - Lucky, being a complete tease, and a stroppy one at that. I didn't feel comfortable with the book, not because of sexual content but more because the young girl was portrayed as being very forward and more the perpetrator (she seemed to do most of the `chasing') and therefore felt that I didn't want to pass the book on. This is a shortish, not brilliant story selling at the same retail price as a longer, good book so give it a miss.

Worth reading, but don't expect groundbreaking literature
Nabokov this ain't. But "Roger Fishbite" is certainly well written and enjoyable, updating the whole Lolita theme to the talkshow obsessed 1990s.

Paedophilia is not a charming topic for a book but this offering from Ms Prager is certainly worthy of praise, and it handles the story with a certain amount of taste... thankfully, none of the sex scenes are described in any detail, which is a good move.

If I have any one criticism of this book, it has to be that the style of writing does not fit in with what one would expect of a young teenager. Some of it is well done (eg., the boastful use of the occasional French word with an explanation of what it means, something one would expect a child to do). However, some of the writing just seems too mature for a child, and this is unfortunate.

All in all, a good read, a well-thought out plot, but nothing out of this world. 3 stars out of 5 seems about right.

This is a very eye-opening book. A REWARDING READ!
This book tells a wonderful story of a young schoolgirl's ongoing sexual relationship with an older man. Narrated by the main character, Lucky Linderhoff, the reader follows the tale through the eyes of the beautiful yet manipulative little girl who learns that her sexual presence has dramatic effects on one man in particular, Roger Fishbite. A fantastic story and not one to be missed!