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Product Description
Books in Canada
This strikingly original portrait of a year in the life of a young Montrealer opens with dash and optimism. Baby, almost twelve, and her father, Jules, twenty-six, have taken up residence at a once-stylish downtown hotel. Like all their friends, Jules exudes style: fur hat, long leather jacket, slippery leather boots. He also has a heroin habit. Yet Montreal’s decrepit downtown is viewed through Baby’s eyes as an enchanted place where everyone plays an endless game of dress-up. Having Jules as her dad-her parents were fifteen when she was born-has made her wise, however. “Having a young parent meant you had to pack up your stuff and run away”; this time he has sold a twenty-year-old pal’s guitars. Going out for “chocolate milk” means dad needs to score. But the strong love and good memories between them keep her hopeful.
Depending on the severity of Jules’ troubles (TB treatment, Detox, his harsh reaction to Baby’s adolescence), Baby moves in and out of foster homes and even into a detention centre where every kid she meets is a character. Although nothing shakes her love for Jules, there’s only one career option for an attractive, neglected girl, no matter how bright and imaginative. Attracting a local pimp, Baby enters the sex trade while still scoring A’s at school. These scenes are hard to bear. But O’Neill allows us to see beyond the squalor into the heart of a girl who won’t-through pluck, brains, and a last-minute authorial rescue-be destroyed.
Although she sounds sometimes like Holden Caulfield, the spirit of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” hovers over this Montreal story: “There are heroes in the seaweed/There are children in the morning/They are leaning out for love/And they will lean that way forever.” This time it’s Baby who “holds the mirror” to an extraordinary world the rest of us tend to tune out.
Nancy Wigston (Books in Canada)
Depending on the severity of Jules’ troubles (TB treatment, Detox, his harsh reaction to Baby’s adolescence), Baby moves in and out of foster homes and even into a detention centre where every kid she meets is a character. Although nothing shakes her love for Jules, there’s only one career option for an attractive, neglected girl, no matter how bright and imaginative. Attracting a local pimp, Baby enters the sex trade while still scoring A’s at school. These scenes are hard to bear. But O’Neill allows us to see beyond the squalor into the heart of a girl who won’t-through pluck, brains, and a last-minute authorial rescue-be destroyed.
Although she sounds sometimes like Holden Caulfield, the spirit of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” hovers over this Montreal story: “There are heroes in the seaweed/There are children in the morning/They are leaning out for love/And they will lean that way forever.” This time it’s Baby who “holds the mirror” to an extraordinary world the rest of us tend to tune out.
Nancy Wigston (Books in Canada)
From Publishers Weekly
In her debut novel, This American Life contributor O'Neill offers a narrator, Baby, coming of age in Montreal just before her 12th birthday. Her mother is long dead. Her father, Jules, is a junkie who shuttles her from crumbling hotels to rotting apartments, his short-term work or moneymaking schemes always undermined by his rage and paranoia. Baby tries to screen out the bad parts by hanging out at the community center and in other kids' apartments, by focusing on school when she can and by taking mushrooms and the like. (She finds sex mostly painful.) Stints in foster care, family services and juvenile detention ("nostalgia could kill you there") usually end in Jules's return and his increasingly erratic behavior. Baby's intelligence and self-awareness can't protect her from parental and kid-on-kid violence, or from the seductive power of being desired by Alphonse, a charismatic predator, on the one hand, and by Xavier, an idealistic classmate, on the other. When her lives collide, Baby faces choices she is not equipped to make. O'Neill's vivid prose owes a debt to Donna Tartt's The Little Friend; the plot has a staccato feel that's appropriate but that doesn't coalesce. Baby's precocious introspection, however, feels pitch perfect, and the book's final pages are tear-jerkingly effective. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book, Great Prce,
By
This review is from: LULLABIES FOR LITTLE CRIMINALS (Paperback)
Very interesting book. Heartwarming and easy to follow with well written characters. Pulls you in and won't let you go until the last page. A real page turner that brings you back and forth seamlessly between the world of a little girls imagination and the cruel world of reality.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best of 2006,
By Kelly Rossiter (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lullabies For Little Criminals: A Novel (Paperback)
Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals was one of the best books I read from the 2006 season. It is the story of Baby, a 12 year old girl who lives with her heroin addicted father Jules. They live perilous lives, but Baby doesn't mind because she loves her dad and they are together. When Jules goes into rehab Baby is placed in foster care and her life spirals away from what little protection and stability it had The narrative voice of this twelve year old was completely believable. O'Neill captures the essence of the child teetering on the edge of a very nasty adulthood. The little girl who sits down and plays with dolls after turning tricks is heartbreaking. Baby's relationship with the nerdy kid Xavier in her class is one of the joys of the book. With him she can be a child, have a friend, be openly as smart as she is and feel the stirrings of first love (even though she is already a prostitute). This is a book that you sometimes have to put down and walk away from, but you always come back because the writing is so sharp and clear and the character of Baby is so well drawn that you really care about what happens to her.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
well-written but a bit flat,
By
This review is from: Lullabies For Little Criminals: A Novel (Paperback)
[Cross-posted on LibraryThing]
In Lullabies, we follow twelve-year-old Baby as she comes of age in the red light district of Montreal surrounded by drug addicts, pimps, and other neglected children. Her father is a junkie who can't seem to kick his habit and doesn't see the effect it has on his daughter. Her mother died when she was a baby and left a void that Baby constantly tries to fill in completely inappropriate ways. Baby's story is heartbreaking and it's unsettling to read about a twelve-year-old being taken advantage of by pimps and trying to score heroin in a night club. There were times as I was reading that I'd have to remind myself that all of these adult things are being recounted by a child. The story was very well-written and it had moments that were genuinely funny. I enjoyed reading it (as much you can 'enjoy' a book about sad things) but ultimately, it didn't move me as much as I'd thought it would. Despite the subject matter being so heavy and all of these things happening to Baby that would have a big emotional impact on her, they are told in such a matter-of-fact, sort of detached way that it was hard to really connect with it. I also got a sense that the author was holding something back. As Baby gets deeper and deeper into bad situations, you keep expecting the consequences to get worse and something really terrible to happen because in reality, they certainly would for a girl doing the things she does. But O'Neill seems to avoid going too deep. She sets it up, then pulls back. This was my issue with the ending as well. *Minor spoiler alert* The book seemed to be building up towards a dramatic climax, you think things can't possibly get worse for Baby, and then suddenly, she's free and all is well (relatively speaking). The means of her escape is way too convenient and the whole thing felt like a cop-out. *End spoiler* Maybe O'Neill didn't want to drag readers through all that muck and leave them without hope at the end but I think that could have been managed in a way that would have stayed true to the rest of the story.
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