There’s a lot to say about young storytellers attempting to understand the world of grownups. Their perceptions and descriptions of the people around them are so naively captivating that they could only be from a person who has not yet lost their wide-eyed creativity to the process of growing up. Just like the works of Alice Sebold and Mark Haddon, Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals stands strong and firm in this grouping; the book came out triumphant as the victor of CBC’s Canada Reads 2007.
Lullabies’ protagonist is Baby, a semi-street smart 12-year-old who lives with her father Jules in Montreal’s red light district. As Jules is searching for his next fix, Baby is out befriending street kids and hookers, and developing feelings for pimps and nice awkward boys her own age.
For a girl with very little to be optimistic about, Baby never seems to lose the desire for something whimsical 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 transported from foster home to jail to motel to empty apartment, Baby somehow preserves her tenderheartedness - 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 complex beauty of love is so multifaceted that there is no right or wrong way to experience it. Baby proves this numerous times throughout her story as she approaches the gateway between child and adult, straddling it with the most serious of smiles. Her last journey leaves you clinging to the final page, forced to decide for yourself what love really is.
