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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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