Book Review of "Lullabies for Little Criminals"

By Heather O'Neill

There’s something about young narrators trying to make sense of a grown-up world.  Their observations and explanations of the lives around them are so innocently disarming that they could only be from someone who has not yet lost their imagination to the ravages of time. 

Like the works of Mark Haddon and Alice Sebold, Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals stands firm and proud in this category; the novel came out victorious as the winner of CBC’s Canada Reads 2007.

Lullabies’ heroine is Baby, a clever 12-year-old who lives with her father Jules in Montreal’s red light district.  While Jules is looking for his next fix, Baby is out making friends with street kids and prostitutes, falling in love with pimps and sweet, slightly awkward boys her own age. 

 

For a girl with so little to look forward to, Baby never seems to lose the desire for something magical to happen: “Even the little cockroaches in the wall are clockwork.  They are made with the most beautiful tiny bolts from a factory in Malaysia.  They have little buttons underneath to switch them on and off.” 

Even as she’s trucked from foster home to detention centre to motel room to unfurnished apartment, Baby somehow maintains her empathy - her desire to love and be loved: “Although I had kissed a lot of other people, that kiss was really my first. The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of.  It was as if I had been playing Russian Roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it.”

The nature and beauty of love is so complex that there is no right or wrong way to experience it.  Baby proves this infinitely throughout her story as she approaches the threshold between child and adult, straddling it with the most serious of smiles.  Her last journey leaves you clinging to the final page, deciding for yourself what love really is.

-written by Jessie Davis

 

 

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