Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill
My rating: 4/5 cats
don’t make your books look like chick lit if you want people to read ’em.
more free advice from me.
but it’s true – not all of us have a sarah montambo in our lives to tell us, “no, this is really very good.” because it is. and this is not just me groping all the canadian books in the corner of the dancefloor, this book is a sparkly little gem.
at the beginning, it reminded me a lot of weetzie bat. it is a similarly glossy-slick storytelling style, but this one is about a girl with a loving junkie single dad who treats her like a peer (and since he is only 15 years older than her, he’s not far off) and they breeze from apartment to apartment in montreal in a daze where there are no consequences and everything will be okay, even if they have no money and there are dangers on the streets and foster homes.
but it doesn’t stay rosy.
this one is not teen fiction, but she captures the young teenage character so well, in both thoughts and actions. even though baby is exposed to so much that is unsavory, she is still a little kid with a kid’s energy, freaking out pimps with her sudden dancing and yelling, trashing a house and not stealing the jewelry (because of her own kid-logic) but stealing a cute turtle knickknack, avoiding bathing…it’s like what greg is always saying when he talks about lolita; that lo is totally gross, the way a little kid is, playing with her gum and being dirty and smelly, and it’s not like in the movie at all, or in most may-december films. kids are rarely sexually precocious, even when they are imitating behaviors they have seen or been taught. the gross will always out. and i loved that about this book; the moments of kid-grossery that would pop out unexpectedly.
in the back of the book, where harpercollins slaps all those readers’ guides and interviews, there is this wonderful passage in her “making of” feature:
The inability to properly identify danger exists throughout the book. Whereas children can be terrified by a puppet of a crocodile or a photograph of a shark in a national geographic magazine, they are unable to get it through their heads to look both ways when they cross the street or that there are strangers that you cannot talk to….
When I was eleven, I used to have a friend whose older brother was a junkie. He and his friends were the coolest kids in the neighborhood. Some high points in my childhood were when drug addicts would flip out and come out of their apartments in their underwear with cats on their heads. We kids would dance around them, shouting and laughing with our hands up in the air. I wanted to capture this nonjudgmental attitude a lot of lower-class kids have to drugs. I also wanted to portray the relationships these same kids have with seedy adults. Children believe the lies that adults tell them and are dutifully impressed. Lowlifes are fantastical creatures who animate the world of children, and, in turn, lowlifes love children who are their most captive and adoring audience.
that’s what i was trying to say, about the things i liked about this book. but she is a writer, so she said it much much better.
this book was written five years ago. i am ready for a follow-up, please!!
edit – yayyy!!! i finally got my second book. thanks for listening, heather o’neill!
