This article applies Bakhtin’s Carnival Theory to Mahy’s The Tricksters (in which some of them main characters and the place where the story is set have the striking name Carnival), looking at the plot, characters and style of the novel. Reading The Tricksters in terms of Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque highlights a number of topics which are recurring in Mahy’s novels: family hierarchies and their inversions and the relation between reader and writer and fiction and truth. This article argues that applying Bakhtin’s Carnival Theory to The Tricksters suggests a strong connection between these three interests of the author.