Journal Entry 1 by teachie from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire United Kingdom on Saturday, August 02, 2008

In her debut novel, This American Life contributor O'Neill offers a narrator, Baby, coming of age in Montreal just before her 12th birthday. Her mother is long dead. Her father, Jules, is a junkie who shuttles her from crumbling hotels to rotting apartments, his short-term work or moneymaking schemes always undermined by his rage and paranoia. Baby tries to screen out the bad parts by hanging out at the community center and in other kids' apartments, by focusing on school when she can and by taking mushrooms and the like. (She finds sex mostly painful.) Stints in foster care, family services and juvenile detention ("nostalgia could kill you there") usually end in Jules's return and his increasingly erratic behavior. Baby's intelligence and self-awareness can't protect her from parental and kid-on-kid violence, or from the seductive power of being desired by Alphonse, a charismatic predator, on the one hand, and by Xavier, an idealistic classmate, on the other. When her lives collide, Baby faces choices she is not equipped to make. O'Neill's vivid prose owes a debt to Donna Tartt's The Little Friend; the plot has a staccato feel that's appropriate but that doesn't coalesce. Baby's precocious introspection, however, feels pitch perfect, and the book's final pages are tear-jerkingly effective. 

Journal Entry 2 by teachie from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire United Kingdom on Friday, September 05, 2008

This is off to Giz for the October Euroexchange. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

Journal Entry 3 by Giz-angel from Greenwich, Greater London United Kingdom on Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Thanks so much teachie I thought this looked great from the description can't wait to get to it! Thanks for the card too xxx 

Journal Entry 4 by Giz-angel from Greenwich, Greater London United Kingdom on Monday, January 12, 2009

Well I did enjoy it although it isn't the most uplifting of books! But it was interesting and thought provoking.

 

Journal Entry 5 by krin511 from Olney, Maryland USA on Thursday, March 12, 2009

Arrived today - thanks! 

Journal Entry 6 by krin511 from Olney, Maryland USA on Monday, April 12, 2010

This was a very good book about finding one's way in the world and the need to be important to someone. I liked how Baby learned about herself and her father.