Book Title:  lullabies for little criminals (fiction)

Author: Heather O'Neill

Publishing Company:  Harper Perennial

Year:  2006

# of Pages:  330

ISBN-13 #:  978-0-06-087507-7

ISBN-10 #:  0-06-087507-0 

$13.95 USA

$17.50 Canada

4 Stars

Reviewer:  Deborah Ground Buckner

lullabies for little criminals should come with a warning that it will cause loss of sleep, failure to remember the roast in the oven, and inability to hear the telephone ring. This is a story so riveting that merely calling it a "page-turner" seems insufficient.

Baby, the story's protagonist and narrator, is twelve years old through much of the book. She lives with her father, Jules, only fifteen years her senior, in the seediest sections of Montreal. Their life is a nomadic existence, moving from one cheap furnished apartment to another, escaping from landlords, drug dealers, or the friend whose stuff Jules sold after growing tired of storing it. Baby is street smart yet still an innocent child at the same time. 

Author Heather O'Neill makes her debut with this novel, drawing in part from her own experiences in surviving a broken home, going to live with her before-unknown-to-her father "in the middle of childhood."  As she describes her life from that time:  "There were some nice things about my dad.  He would sit across from me on the melamine table in our tiny kitchen with its ripped red tiles, listing crimes he had committed when he was a child.  We would go eat oysters out of a can with a toothpick and drink tonic water form the bottle in Saint-Louis Square, a park filled with hobos and drug dealers.  And those times were good." 

In contrast to today's privileged children living an organized life of dance lessons and soccer practice and spending free times with video games, having little interaction with their neighbors, O'Neill says:  "The neighborhood is the center of the universe to a street kid and you develop a hysterical need to become a superstar there.  . . .  Children are holy on the street.  . . .  A child can have a successful profession on the street, can make real money through panhandling, stealing, and prostitution.  But the price for this lifestyle always comes as a shock.  It's just like when Pinocchio realizes that he is turning into a donkey in the land of Fun and Games.  Suddenly you realize that you aren't a child anymore, you've become a grown-up.  When you lose your sense of make believe, your life is no longer wild and romantic, but instead one that nobody wants, including yourself."

With this real-life background, O'Neill creates the world of Baby.  Despite the life of poverty, parental neglect, shuttling from trashy apartment to foster home to trashy apartment to juvenile detention to the street, Baby seems to hold on to her sense of make believe, still seeing the wonder of the world.  O'Neill's writing captures the voice of a twelve-year-old who still looks at the stars, and the writing is filled with beautiful imagery.  The core that keeps Baby sane in her insane world comes from deep within:  "I just wanted to be a good kid.  I didn't want to sit drinking beer in a car with a bunch of teenagers who were going to be in grade seven for the next four years, who talked about stuff you would see on the cover of the tabloid newspapers." 

Even after she falls prey to the neighborhood pimp, that internal sense of self never really leaves Baby.  "I crossed the street without even looking, and a bunch of cars honked hysterically.  I didn't care.  If you added up all the times I'd fallen off monkey bars and the like and come out unscathed, you'd have to agree that my chances for survival were incredibly high."

When forced to turn her first trick, at the age of 13, she refuses to tell her real name.  "I didn't want him to have anything to do with my name.  All of a sudden it seemed precious to me."  It is this holding on to her own self, along with her academic talents that provide an escape rope for Baby, even though she is too young to realize it.

This is a book filled with filth, with the vivid descriptions and the raw language of the streets, and within just a few pages, the reader is completely taken into Baby's world.  Other books have told the stories of children on the streets, but none so vividly and so devoid of preaching.  So, what is the purpose of this book?  Why take a reader on such a journey of ugliness?  With no need to take out a billboard to drive home her point, O'Neill displays graphically the price of poverty, its impact on children and how easily one bad experience leads to another.  Yet, it is not a story devoid of hope.  In the end, O'Neill makes clear a parent-child relationship, even in the worst of scenarios, can still be a relationship.  Having hit bottom, there is still a hope of an upturn.  After reading this book, one will never look at a homeless person on the street in quite the same way.  O'Neill makes it easy to understand how one can reach such a state.

There are a few points of frustration with the writing.  Baby describes in great detail her stays at a foster home and a detention center, so it is a bit confusing when she later introduces a memory of an event or new character from those times as important, though there had been no earlier mention of it.  I would believe going through withdrawal from heroin would require a more lengthy time than just a bus ride into the country.  As much as one wants to believe Baby will find a happy ending, there must be a realization that she carries a lot of baggage with her that will take time to overcome.  But these are minor points in the whole story. 

O'Neill has created a first novel that doesn't just tell a story, but makes the reader live through it.  I look forward to her next work.