2008 Woodie Awards
Sing Me a Lullaby...
Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals
Curtis Tompkins
Issue date: 9/13/06 Section: The Pulse
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Heather O'Neill's debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, captures those moments of childhood in which we desperately try to survive and assimilate into an adult world even though we are hopelessly stuck in our childish bodies and minds. Children often experience the most unsettling of situations, with only their own intellect or nerve to guide them through it. O'Neill shows just how far intellect and nerve can take a child by crafting a portrait of a young girl growing up on the streets.
Due out in November, this coming of age tale introduces a thirteen-year-old girl named Baby growing up with a father, Jules, only 15 years older than her. It begins happily enough with Jules and Baby moving into a new apartment, one of many in the past months. Although Jules likes to dabble in heroin, Baby loves him and looks on him like any other father, never questioning her squalid surroundings in the heart of Montreal, where she has spent most of her life.
Like Claude Brown and others before her, O'Neill shows Baby's world through the first person, with the child's mind set not on what breaks the reader's heart to begin with-her extreme poverty and the drug use and prostitution surrounding her- but on things that define her world: the need for love, search for acceptance, and want of understanding that she assumes comes with adulthood. Not knowing any other kind of life, Baby accepts her world as it is and, in trying to fulfill herself through it, she ends up in places she barely understands. She must learn, at much earlier an age than most, of the savage flaws of grown-up men like her father or the pimp Alphonse that takes a liking to her. At the same time, she balances two worlds where she is either a fraudulent grown-up claiming to be knowledgeable in the worlds of sex and drugs or trying to actually be a child experiencing pure love and innocence for the first time with a young boy named Xavier.
In her prose, O'Neill succeeds fairly well in making a convincing narration through Baby's thoughts and voice. Baby is, of course, often unreliable in her assessment of things, even to a comically tragic point, and even though she speaks in the past tense, it becomes obvious that she is not speaking from far into the future; she shows her world exactly as she saw it at thirteen. Only a few times does the author get ahead of herself, forcing in things that are a little too adult, biased, and unfitting to Baby's mind, but mostly it has more than redeeming qualities. An epiphany like, "It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you" is a necessity if a work like this is ever to be worthy of a place next to Brown, Joyce, or Salinger.
A story like Baby's is not at all far-fetched. In fact, worse stories are overlooked everyday-on the news, in the paper or in front of our very eyes. There are a million true stories just like Baby's out there, and in discovering Baby's story, you may catch a glimpse of that old axiomatic truth that all lives are desperately similar and horribly different at the same moment, especially in childhood. On this read, you will feel for Baby, but you will probably spend just as much time shuddering in the cold shadows of your own childhood. Don't let it get you down. As you've seen, everything comes out all right one way or the other.
3 out of 5.
Due out in November, this coming of age tale introduces a thirteen-year-old girl named Baby growing up with a father, Jules, only 15 years older than her. It begins happily enough with Jules and Baby moving into a new apartment, one of many in the past months. Although Jules likes to dabble in heroin, Baby loves him and looks on him like any other father, never questioning her squalid surroundings in the heart of Montreal, where she has spent most of her life.
Like Claude Brown and others before her, O'Neill shows Baby's world through the first person, with the child's mind set not on what breaks the reader's heart to begin with-her extreme poverty and the drug use and prostitution surrounding her- but on things that define her world: the need for love, search for acceptance, and want of understanding that she assumes comes with adulthood. Not knowing any other kind of life, Baby accepts her world as it is and, in trying to fulfill herself through it, she ends up in places she barely understands. She must learn, at much earlier an age than most, of the savage flaws of grown-up men like her father or the pimp Alphonse that takes a liking to her. At the same time, she balances two worlds where she is either a fraudulent grown-up claiming to be knowledgeable in the worlds of sex and drugs or trying to actually be a child experiencing pure love and innocence for the first time with a young boy named Xavier.
In her prose, O'Neill succeeds fairly well in making a convincing narration through Baby's thoughts and voice. Baby is, of course, often unreliable in her assessment of things, even to a comically tragic point, and even though she speaks in the past tense, it becomes obvious that she is not speaking from far into the future; she shows her world exactly as she saw it at thirteen. Only a few times does the author get ahead of herself, forcing in things that are a little too adult, biased, and unfitting to Baby's mind, but mostly it has more than redeeming qualities. An epiphany like, "It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you" is a necessity if a work like this is ever to be worthy of a place next to Brown, Joyce, or Salinger.
A story like Baby's is not at all far-fetched. In fact, worse stories are overlooked everyday-on the news, in the paper or in front of our very eyes. There are a million true stories just like Baby's out there, and in discovering Baby's story, you may catch a glimpse of that old axiomatic truth that all lives are desperately similar and horribly different at the same moment, especially in childhood. On this read, you will feel for Baby, but you will probably spend just as much time shuddering in the cold shadows of your own childhood. Don't let it get you down. As you've seen, everything comes out all right one way or the other.
3 out of 5.
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