Lullabies for Little Criminals - Abridged

Reviews

Told with shafts of wit and a lightness of touch which few novels on such themes achieve. Baby, like Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye, is totally believable. Although few people suffer a childhood like hers, everyone can identify with her feelings, on the threshold of adolescence longing for stability and recognition From feisty little Scout of To Kill a Mockingbird to Sissy Spacek's blank-eyed Holly in the film Badlands, Heather O'Neill draws on the annals of knowing child narrators to shape Baby's shabby, scrappy scrabble from broken home to detention centre to pimp's lap and back again. Scabrous humour and brutal insight fairly jolt each episode into life Vivid and poignant . . . O'Neill's novel builds to a riveting climax . . . deeply moving O'Neill bombards the reader with piercing observations and magical imagery . . . Her story is bleak, yet not bitter; full of pathos, spirit and, overwhelmingly, an iridescent innocence O'Neill's vivid prose owes a debt to Donna Tartt's The Little Friend. Baby's precocious introspection feels pitch perfect. Tear-jerkingly effective Dreamy prose . . . Baby's unique voice and the glimmer of hope provided by her intelligence and imaginative spirit live on in the mind long after you have closed the book Heather O'Neill's style is laced with so much sublime possibility and merciless actuality that it makes me think of comets and live wires Expand reviews