Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'neill

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'neill

"A beautiful book. . . . There are phrases in here that will make you laugh out loud, and others that will stop your heart. A definite triumph." -- David Rakoff, author of Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

From Heather O'Neill, the Giller-shortlisted author of Daydreams of Angels and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, a heartbreaking and wholly original coming-of-age novel about a young girl fighting to preserve a bruised innocence on the feral streets of a big city in Montreal.

Baby, all of thirteen years old, is lost in the gangly, coltish moment between childhood and the strange pulls and temptations of the adult world. Her mother is dead; her father Jules is always on the lookout for his next score. Baby knows that "chocolate milk" is Jules' slang for heroin and sees a lot more of that in her house than the real article. But she takes vivid delight in the scrappy bits of happiness and beauty that find their way to her, and moves through the threat of the streets as if she's been choreographed in a dance.

Soon, though, a hazard emerges that is bigger than even her hard-won survival skills can handle. Alphonse, the local pimp, has his eye on her for his new girl; he wants her body and soul--and what the johns don't take he covets for himself. At the same time, a tender and naively passionate friendship unfolds with a boy from her class at school, who has no notion of the dark claims on her--which even her father, lost on the nod, cannot totally ignore. Jules consigns her to a stint in juvie hall, and for the moment this perceived betrayal preserves Baby from terrible harm--but after that, her salvation has to be her own invention.

Channeling the artlessly affecting voice of her thirteen-year-old heroine with extraordinary accuracy and power, O'Neill's dazzles with a novel of extraordinary prescience and power, a subtly understated yet searingly effective story of survival on the streets--and the strength, wits, and luck necessary for it.

Heather O'Neill is a contributor to This American Life, and her writing has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times Magazine. In 2007, her international bestseller Lullabies for Little Criminals received the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Canada Reads competition, and was shortlisted for seven accolades, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and Canada's Governor General's Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her most recent work, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, was called one of the finest books of the year by various magazines and was shortlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for the 2015 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the Encore Award. She currently resides in Montreal.